by Sarah Bird
I speed out of Joyce Chaffee’s neighborhood, check my phone, and see that I forgot to turn it back on. When I power it back up, the phone plays cheerful notes, alerting me that I have a message. I hit the “voice mail” button, praying it will be Aubrey but expecting the freaked-out preemie dad.
After some electronic sputtering, I hear the message, clear as a bell: “Cam. Sorry, reception is impossible. I’ve finally got a signal, but I don’t know how long it will last, so I’ll cut to the chase. I hope that you’re back from your trip to Europe, because I need to warn you that there might be … I’m not saying there will be, but there might be a problem with the trust. So you and Aubrey should probably get over to the bank as soon as—”
Scattered words blip in and out, then nothing.
OCTOBER 26, 2009
The next day, after getting dragged to a couple of classes meant to show how open and cool all the professors are, sitting next to my mom who won’t stop beaming at all this open coolness, I snap and Inner Bitch reemerges. The thought of spending four more minutes in this place, much less four years, freaks me out so much that I can’t breathe. Literally. I get such a bad asthma attack that Mom wants to take me to the hospital until I get enough breath to tell her to calm the eff down.
She and Dori have pretty much made it that I have to drop the F-bomb to get taken seriously. Still, Mom lets me spend the rest of the day at the motel and she has a great time going to all the sample classes.
OCTOBER 27, 2009
Too much of the asthma medicine combined with my usual too much thinking keeps me awake most of the night so that I am a total crab by the time we drive to the airport.
Mom, meanwhile, continues with her one-woman-show monologue all fakethusiastically, like an old-pro actress playing to a bad audience, until she finally gives up and asks, “Can we just start over today? Is that possible? I was up most of the night trying to figure out what I am doing wrong, and I remembered how your grandmother used to drive me crazy.
“I hated everything about her. I hated the way she chewed, and put on lipstick. I hated the way she smelled. I hated it when she stared at me like she was looking in the mirror and wasn’t sure about her hair or the outfit she was wearing.”
I don’t say anything, but I hate that my mom assumes that my mood and entire being are totally determined by her. I also hate the way she chews. I hate the way she puts on lipstick. And I really hate it when she stares at me the way she is right now, like she is looking in the mirror and isn’t sure about her hair or the outfit she is wearing.
“Anyway, I know that it’s all part of the separation process. I guess that the closer you are, the more it hurts. With you and me. The single mother/daughter, it’s even more intense. Maybe I wanted too much closeness because I didn’t have that with my mother. My mother, your grandmother Rose, and I, we were never … We were always such very, very different people. And then she was sick so much of the time when I was growing up. Maybe I was closer to Bobbi Mac, your great-grandmother, because I never had to go through the whole separation process with her. God, I wish you could have known her.”
She starts to get sniffly, the way she always does when she brings up the legendary Bobbi Mac. Fortunately, she reins herself in and goes on. “For a while I thought that, maybe, your father’s family might, you know, fill in.”
This is another story I know too well. I pray that she won’t retell the sad tale of her schlepping me to visit Dad’s family back when I was too young to remember and how his super-Catholic parents were all griefstricken about their son joining this weirdo cult and for some bizarre reason they blamed her for not being able to hold on to her man. As if she’d driven him to leave us.
Thinking about grandparents who never really wanted to know their own grandchild makes me wonder how bad it must have been for Dad to have had them as parents.
By the time I tune back into my mom, she is telling her favorite story, the one about meeting my father on the train in Morocco and seeing strange tribal people and eating strange tribal food.
“That’s all that I want for you, sweetie.” Her voice has that icky wobble that means she just might start bawling in the hopes that her tears will melt my callous-bitch heart. “I just want you to have adventures. Adventures like my grandmother had. Even the adventures that all kids used to have when we’d go out the front door first thing in the morning and not come home till after dark and our parents didn’t know where we were. We were with our friends, riding bikes, building forts, getting sunburns, mosquito bites, breaking our arms. I hate it that you never had a friend whose house you could walk to. That no kid has ever knocked on our door and asked if you could come out and play.”
“Sorry I’m such a pathetic loser.”
“No! No, that’s not what I mean. It’s not your fault. It’s Parkhaven. It’s always been Parkhaven. I thought it would be kid paradise. Then, once we were stuck there, I realized that, yeah, there are lots of kids, but they are all in Mommy and Me or select soccer or Space Camp. Or something. I was stunned. Honest to God, you could see more children on Wall Street than you could out playing in our neighborhood. Anyway, this is your chance to start your life.”
I want to thank her for negating my entire childhood and pretty much everything that made me me, but that would definitely have made her cry.
“To meet new people,” she adds.
Meet new middle-class white people with parents who never got over being hippies.
“To have adventures.”
Have your adventures.
“Aubrey, don’t shut me out. Please, I love you more than anyone on this earth. I want to know you. I want to know what’s in your beautiful brain.”
Yeah, right. Just so long as it happens to be exactly what is in your brain.
“Please, can’t we talk?”
“Sure, Mom.” Then, because I have been, I say, “I’m sorry I’ve been so churlish.”
At the word “churlish,” Dad’s signature word, she whips her head in my direction so fast it’s like she just got an electric shock. Dad must have still been using the word when they met. She studies me until I get scared and have to say, “Uh, Mom, the road,” because we’re driving on the shoulder.
Her reaction pretty much confirms my suspicion that if I utter one wrong word, she will know everything. I also see really clearly how upset the slightest mention of my father would make her.
We drive in silence for a long time and the car fills up with her sadness. I stare out at a drizzly, gray world that looks like the inside of an oyster and try to think of something to talk about to comfort her, to get her bubbly mood back, even if it was fake. But honestly I can’t think of one thing to say.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Get the fuck out!” Dori squeals when I tell her that Martin called. Really called. That it really was him.
We’re sitting in the parking lot of Parkhaven Medical Center while I figure out what to do. “He said he hoped I was back from my trip to Europe.”
“Was he kidding? Does he know that the only trip you’ve taken in the last ten years was the College Tour from Hell?”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“ ‘Trip to Europe’? Does Martin have a really bad sense of humor?”
“Actually, he had a good sense of humor. Before Next. Forget Martin’s sense of humor; he said there might be a problem at the bank.”
“Call him! Call him! Call him!”
I try. Several times, but don’t get through.
Dori gasps in wonderment. “You just heard from the love of your life for the first time in sixteen years.”
“Dori, calm down, okay? This is not an episode of Gossip Girl, and who said he was the love of my life?”
“You. On more than one occasion.”
“Had there been drinking beforehand?”
“There is always drinking beforehand with us. Um gee!” she bursts out, her abbreviation for the abbreviation “OMG.” “Do you remember that article
I e-mailed you?”
“Dori, you e-mail me roughly half a dozen articles a day. I don’t always have time to catch up on Cosmo’s ‘Seventy-five Crazy-Hot Sex Moves.’ ”
“No, the one about rekindled romances.”
“Dori, please.”
“Seriously, this researcher wrote about why Classmates-dotcom and Facebook and all these sites where you reconnect with old sweethearts are causing this epidemic of divorces. A person’s first big love gets stored in the brain in the exact same place as crack cocaine does and just even seeing the old flame’s picture on Facebook can, like, reactivate the addiction. So are you all rekindled?”
“Dori, no kindling. No crack. Okay? I have got to focus.”
“No, really. This is all true. The researcher did a whole study on it and found out that the most amazing thing is that these couples who get back together, you know, leave their wives and husbands of thirty years for their first big love, have incredibly successful relationships with the first love. I mean, it’s a delusion, but a delusion that totally works in the real world. So are you blown away? You seem blown away.”
“Dori, you’re not following the plot here: There is a very real possibility that something has happened to my daughter’s college fund.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe he was just checking to make sure you got the money.”
“He said there was a problem.”
“Where was he calling from?”
“He didn’t say. Sounded like he was driving. I heard traffic.”
I hit Aubrey’s number. For roughly the thousandth time, her voice mail picks up and I scream at the phone, “Answer, damn you!”
Dori states the obvious: “Call Tyler the Defiler.”
I hesitate. Not just because Tyler is the last person on earth I want to talk to, but because when, under great duress, I did manage to extract his number, Aubrey made me swear that I would use it only under very precise circumstances. Like if I were bound and gagged in the trunk of a kidnapper’s car. For the past six months, Aubrey has done everything in her power to keep Tyler and me as far apart as possible.
I dial his number and, of course, it’s straight to voice mail. I put his message on speakerphone for Dori to hear, and slump back as I wait for whatever cocky, football-hero attempt at lame humor will follow. I predict white-boy ghetto wannabe, “wigger,” as Aubrey so charmingly calls such poseurs. Instead, we hear a polite young man tell us, “Hello, you have reached the number of Ty-Aub Enterprises.”
Dori pops her eyes, mouths, Ty-Aub Enterprises?
“Please leave a number and one of us will return your call as soon as possible.”
I press the phone to my mouth. “Tyler, this is Aubrey’s mother. I need her to call me right now! Immediately. There might be a problem at the bank. So, seriously, when you get this have her call me. Stat.”
I hang up. “ ‘Ty-Aub Enterprises’? That delusional asshole has upgraded his goddamn roach coach to ‘enterprises.’ God, I hate that cocky little bastard.” I calm down, turn to Dori. “So, you up for coming with me to drag Aubrey to the bank?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks for being on my side.”
“Is there any other?”
We drive in silence as I beeline along the fastest route to the roach coach. A horn honks when I cut a pickup off. I wiggle through a yellow light, then floor it, blasting down the road, swerving from lane to lane, passing nothing but an endless loop of Best Buy–Ross–Home Depot–Joe’s Crab Shack–TJMaxx–Best Buys.
A person looks at his or her surroundings in completely different ways depending upon whether they are temporary or permanent. Parkhaven, for the eighteen years we’ve lived here, has been softened for me by the gauzy scrim of impermanence. It was just the place Aubrey and I had to be to get her an education good enough that she’d never have to live in a place with no sidewalks, where no one knew their neighbors, and all physical activity started with loading children into a minivan. With that scrim now in danger of being ripped away, with Aubrey’s college escape plan threatened, Parkhaven’s awfulness hits me in a whole new way and I speed up even more.
“Uh, just FYI,” Dori says, gripping the sides of her seat. “That light? The one you just barreled through? It was red. A deep, dark, hemorrhaging, corpuscle red.”
I recognize in a distant, abstract way that if Dori Chotzinoff is scared, I should slow down, but I am too intent on my mission. I nod without taking my mind off passing a dump truck overloaded with gravel.
Pebbles are ricocheting off my windshield when Dori asks, “So?”
Even though I know exactly what she means, I say, “So what?”
“Oh, come on. Any tingles?”
“Dori, please, this really is not the time.”
That’s what I say, but I am remembering the split second after Martin said, “Cam.” Before the more orderly parts of my brain had processed what was going on, there were, in fact, nothing but tingles. Massive, heart-stopping tingles. Colossally irritating, humiliating tingles that I will never acknowledge.
I blast past the truck. It is several miles before I warn Dori, “Look, when—if—if he calls back, there will be lying.”
“God, of course. Will it be of the I-am-surrounded-by-hot-hunky-lovers-lining-up-to-kill-for-what-you-tossed-away variety or the my-life-without-you-has-been-an-impeccable-dream version?”
“The impeccable-dream one.”
“Great. In that case, Aubrey is all packed and ready and eager to go to college and she has a major picked out and her roommate has already invited her to spend Thanksgiving with her family on Cape Cod.”
“Yeah, the Cape Cod version. Sign me up for that one.”
OCTOBER 29, 2009
I cram my backpack under the attendance counter. There is already a swarm of students waiting on the other side.
“You’re late,” Miss Olivia teases. “Should I write you up?”
I shrug. “Go ahead.”
“How was the big college tour?”
“Fine.” I.e., effed-up, insecure, neurotic, and evil. Highly evil.
And then I am besieged by kids shoving notes at me from their orthodontists, pediatricians, marriage counselors. I don’t care. I am supposed to care, supposed to check, but I don’t. They could hand me a note cut out of letters from the newspaper telling me where to drop the ransom money and I’d write them out an excused absence slip. If Peninsula or, really, any college is what I’m supposed to be working toward, caring about, then I seriously, seriously do not care.
When Twyla’s old emo-stoner friend Miles Kropp, the chronic Jims ’n’ Jays guy, shows up with his eyes flaming red, he no longer seems like a giggling ass. He suddenly seems like the only person in my whole universe who has the tiniest clue. He’s figured out that Parkhaven High requires anesthesia. All the synonyms that Twyla was so fond of for getting messed up scroll through my brain, because, for the first time ever, I am overwhelmed by the desire to “toke up till I woke up.” I want to ask Miles to take me to his car and get me stoned, blazed, blitzed, toasted, tore up from the floor up, wrecked, high, ripped, buzzed, and then I can’t remember any more. Wasted? Wasted might be one of Dori’s.
Tacked under the counter is Miss Olivia’s latest list of all the students who aren’t allowed any more excused tardies. Miles Kropp is at the top of her list.
Miss Olivia has her headset on and is listening to messages using her supersleuth powers to decide whether the person calling in is a parent or a conniving student she must hunt down and punish. Possibly kill. As fast as I can, I write Miles a slip, shove it at him, and whisper, “Next time they’ll suspend you.”
The wheels turning very, very slowly, he finally nods in understanding and is about to leave when Miss Olivia rips her headphones off. “Aubrey, what are you doing? That’s Miles Kropp! Kropp is on the list. Aren’t you reading your list? No more excused tardies for Kropp.”
I grab a note off the pile in front of me and wave it at Miss Olivia. “He h
as a note from his doctor. See?”
Miles manages to fire just enough synapses to snatch up the slip and disappear. Miss Olivia, who is not a fan of standing or, really, moving her body in any way, rolls her chair toward me. “Let me have a look at that.” She sticks her hand out. “It’s probably forged.”
My doom wheels closer and I am oddly elated to discover that even then I don’t care. I wonder how many lines I’d have to cross to get suspended. “Suspended.” Why has that word ever held any terror for me? Suspended. Suspended animation. Not having to decide where to go to college and what to major in and, essentially, plan out the rest of my entire life. Just to completely freeze everything. Like Sleeping Beauty. Only not at Parkhaven High. Anywhere but Parkhaven. It sounds like the most blissful state I can imagine. I want to be suspended.
Miss Olivia abruptly stops dead in her tracks and looks up at someone behind me. A voice asks, “Hey, Pink Puke, how was Penn State? Awesome team. They recruiting you? Hold out for a car.”
As I turn around, Miss Olivia babbles at me, “He asked where you were. I told him Penn something and he knew right away what I was talking about. Didn’t you, Ty?” She giggles. Miss Olivia giggles.
The sun is angling in through the glass doors behind Tyler and sending beams of light shooting out around his head in a haloed, He Is Risen way so cheesy even I can’t take my pathetic fan-girl crush seriously anymore. A handsome, sexy quarterback? Could I be a bigger cliché? And it is so clear from the way he is acting that this happens all the time. It happens so much, in fact, that, like a celebrity, he’s learned to handle it gracefully. To be nice to the Little People.