Better Than Perfect

by Melissa Kantor

  She pulled away and she looked at me for a long minute. I was scared she was going to say something about how I hadn’t visited her again after that first time, but she just squeezed my fingers tightly. Her eyes were shiny, but she didn’t cry.

  I followed her into the house. We were almost like a parade. My mom, then me, then Aunt Kathy. Oliver took up the rear.

  I’d bought some flowers and arranged them on the kitchen table, and my mom noticed them right away. “How pretty,” she said. “Thank you, Juliet.”

  She sat down at the table and looked around. I wanted to ask her what she was looking at, but I was afraid she’d say something depressing like What a waste my life has been, so I just asked if anyone wanted some tea.

  “That would be great,” said Aunt Kathy, and we practically fell over each other trying to get the mugs and tea down from the cabinet. Oliver sat at the table with my mom. Neither of them said anything, and the silence was starting to make me uneasy.

  “It’s so warm,” said Kathy. “Not like November at all.”

  “I can’t believe how close Thanksgiving is,” I said, and I immediately regretted saying it. Surely Thanksgiving was the last thing my mother wanted to think about.

  “If you come to Portland, I’ll make pumpkin pie,” said Aunt Kathy quickly. “I finally found that recipe of Mom’s.”

  “Did you?” asked my mom. “I love that pumpkin pie.” She smiled at me as I put a cup of tea in front of her. “Thank you.” She gave my hand another squeeze. She seemed about to say something else, but she just sipped her tea.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” I said abruptly. As soon as I said it, I wasn’t actually sure if it was true.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling at me. “I’m glad I’m home too.”

  It was weird to go to sleep in my bed, wake up in my bed, and know I was going to sleep in my bed again that night and the next night and the night after that. Even weirder was having me, my mom, and my brother in the house with Aunt Kathy there instead of my dad. We talked about how Oliver’s classes were going. We talked about how soon I’d be hearing from colleges and how crazy it was that the kids who had been in Kathy’s class the first year she taught were now old enough to have kids themselves.

  But we didn’t talk about my dad and we didn’t talk about what had happened with my mom, not even when we were driving home from the airport alone after we dropped Aunt Kathy off. I waited for my mom to bring up that night, and maybe she was waiting for me to bring it up, but in the end we just went for dinner at the Thai restaurant near our house. I got a Sprite and my mom ordered a Diet Coke instead of a glass of wine and we didn’t talk about that, either. It was strange how we could talk so much and say so little, and as the weeks passed and we continued to talk and talk and say absolutely nothing, I wondered if something had changed or if this was how things had always been between us and I’d just never noticed.

  26

  Even though the Harvard website said that admissions decisions would be emailed at five p.m. eastern standard time, on December 15, Jason and I both cut practice that day, went back to his house, and at 3:27 started checking our email every five minutes.

  “This is stupid,” I said at 4:10. “I feel like they’re sitting at the admissions office watching us check our email and laughing.”

  Jason was staring at his phone as if it might suddenly call him and tell him he’d been admitted to Harvard. “Just as long as they’re not sitting there and deciding to reject us because we won’t stop checking.”

  I laughed. “How funny would that be? If, after all the essays and all the tests and all the tours, they decided based on who waited to check their email until five o’clock.”

  “Hilarious,” said Jason, hitting the refresh button. “I can’t stop laughing.”

  “What if one of us gets in and the other doesn’t?” I draped my legs over his and lay back on the soft cushion of the sofa.

  “If I get in and you don’t, I’m not going.” He hit refresh.

  “That is such a lie!” I kicked him.

  “Ouch!” He pushed my legs off his lap. “Anyway, that’s not how it’s going to happen. I’m going to be the one who gets rejected. You’re a third-generation legacy, J.”

  “So, what, in September I couldn’t drop Latin; now I’m guaranteed a spot?”

  He hit refresh. “Something like that.”

  I folded my legs under me and stared at the ceiling. “What if we both got in and both deferred? We could spend next year working our way around Europe.”

  “No working papers,” he said, taking his eyes off the screen of his phone long enough to look at my phone. “Would you check your email already? Maybe they’re going alphabetically.”

  I checked. Nothing. I closed the window. “What about China? We could teach English in China.”

  Jason hit refresh. “We don’t speak Chinese.”

  I closed my eyes, enjoying the fantasy. No classes. No homework. No finals. “Can’t you see us, two accepted Harvard students, one with perfect SAT scores, offering tutoring to—”

  “Holy shit!” he screamed.

  I sat up and stared at him. “Holy shit?”

  He turned to me. “I got in!”

  “Oh my God!” I screamed. I threw my arms around him. “You got in! You got in!”

  “Check. Check.” He gestured frantically for me to get my phone, and I scrambled for it, my hands shaking so much I couldn’t get my email to open.

  And then it opened.

  And there it was. Dear Juliet. Congratulations! I am delighted to welcome you to the Harvard class of . . .

  I sat, not moving, staring at the screen. “It says . . . it says I got in.” I waited for the joy that had flooded me when I got my SAT scores to wash over me again, but all I felt as I looked at the screen was numb.

  “Hallelujah!” Jason cried, and he picked me up and twirled me around. “We did it! We did it! We fucking rock!”

  I kissed Jason and I let him dance me across the room and I hugged Grace and Mark when they came downstairs to congratulate us.

  But the whole time, I had the strangest feeling that all of this was happening to someone else.

  I called my dad to tell him my news, and he said if you’d told him when he was a boy that one of his children would go to Yale and the other would go to Harvard, he wouldn’t have believed it. I think he was even crying a little. “I’m so proud of you, Juliet,” he said. And he kept saying it. “I’m so incredibly proud of you.” That night, we went out for dinner—Jason, his parents, Bella, me, and my mom. The Robinsons were laughing and making Harvard jokes. They weren’t very funny, and I’d heard most of them before, but I laughed anyway. My mom was quiet. She’d gotten her hair highlighted, and she was wearing a pretty blue silk dress, so she looked more like she used to look before. But when I thought of my mother going out for dinner in the past, I remembered her being . . . shiny. Her skin glowed; her eyes sparkled. She had been glittery and alive, and she would laugh a lot and touch the people she was sitting next to, and those people would laugh and sparkle too. If my parents had friends over and I was home, I’d always hear my mom at the center of the conversation, but tonight she wasn’t saying much, just toying with her food and smiling whenever someone said something she was supposed to smile at. We were sitting on opposite sides of the table, and she seemed vulnerable to me somehow. I wished I were sitting next to her.

  “And here we go,” said Mark as Grace pulled out a bag from under her chair. She reached into it and took out two boxes wrapped in red with white ribbon.

  Harvard’s colors.

  “Nice touch,” said Jason. He was smiling. He’d been smiling for hours.

  “I wrapped them,” Bella said. She was wearing a Harvard T-shirt.

  Jason ripped open the paper and took the Harvard baseball cap out of the box, popping it on his head and turning to me for approval. I nodded.

  “Looks good,” I said.

  “Open yours,” said Jason.
He turned to his parents. “What would you have done if I’d been rejected?” As soon as he asked the question, he laughed at the absurdity of it.

  “Burned all of it,” his dad said, laughing also. “Immediately. In the dead of night.”

  Everyone laughed. I opened up my box. In it was a notebook with the Harvard crest on it and a red scarf with a white H at each end.

  “Thank you,” I said, looking up at Jason’s parents. Grace and Mark were smiling widely at me.

  “It was our pleasure,” said Grace.

  “Just think,” said Jason. “Next fall, you’ll be taking notes in your Harvard class in your Harvard notebook.” He put his arm around me. “While sitting next to your Harvard boyfriend.”

  More laughter.

  “I still remember my first class at Harvard,” said my mom, and everyone turned to look at her. “Freshman English with Professor Darling. If you got something wrong, he’d say”—she made her voice deep—“‘Has Harvard no standards for admission at all anymore?’” My mom started laughing.

  The Robinsons chuckled, but when my mother kept laughing, I could tell everyone was getting uneasy. I was about to ask if she wanted to go to the ladies’ room with me when she dabbed at the corner of her eye with her napkin. “Sorry,” she said. “It was just . . . a funny memory. I guess you had to be there.” She looked around the table a little nervously, then sipped her seltzer with cranberry juice.

  “Can you believe these two are old enough to go to college?” asked Grace, fiddling with her diamond stud earring. “It feels like you kids were born yesterday.”

  Grace was an excellent hostess. She meant to be polite, but her changing the subject made me feel as if my mother’s memory were something dirty that had to be whisked away as quickly as possible.

  Across the table, my mother sat, watching her hands toy with the blue plastic straw that had come with her drink. I tried to catch her eye to let her know what she’d said was okay, but she didn’t look at me, so I couldn’t.

  Later that night, I was finishing up my English reading when my mom knocked. “Yeah?”

  She pushed my door open hesitantly. “May I come in?”

  “Of course.” I spun my desk chair around. She came and sat on the edge of my bed, like she wasn’t sure if it was okay for her to be sitting there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “If my being there embarrassed you.”

  “What?” I felt awful. “Is that what you thought?”

  “I’m not so great with people these days. I feel very”—she touched a small throw pillow on the end of my bed lightly—“exposed.”

  “Grace and Mark won’t judge you,” I said quickly.

  She sighed. “Yes. They will.”

  “Okay,” I admitted, “they will.”

  My mom gave me a small smile. “Well. I’m glad you let me come. I’m so happy for you, Juliet. I know how hard you’ve worked for this. You should be very proud of yourself.” It was funny how my dad was proud of my acceptance while my mom said I should be proud of it. Given everything she’d done for me for the first three years of high school, she was the one who deserved to be proud.

  “You helped a lot,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I’d say I’ve been more of a hindrance than a help.”

  Remembering how I’d thought that exact thing while she was away made me feel guilty. “Mom, how can you say that? Who organized my life for me for years? Who drove me to all my swim meets before I could drive myself? Who packed the lunch bags for everyone?” I waved an imaginary Ziploc in the air, singing, “Come and get it.”

  She still looked sad. “Who indeed?” she asked quietly. Abruptly she got to her feet. “I should let you do your work. Good night, sweetheart.”

  “Good night.”

  I didn’t like how my mom had said Who indeed? like she really didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what to do, and after a minute I got up and walked out into the hallway. My mom’s door was partway open. I took a few steps toward it. She was talking on the phone. For a minute or so, all I heard was the low murmur of her voice. Then silence. Then she said, “Exactly.”

  I tiptoed back to my room, embarrassed for having been eavesdropping. But why shouldn’t I eavesdrop? How else was I supposed to know if my mother was happily chatting on the phone or was sitting in her bathroom holding a razor to her wrist?

  Did you mean to do it, Mom? That’s all I wanted to know. Did you mean to do it?

  It was the one question I needed the answer to and the one question I couldn’t ask.

  I closed my door, then sat at my desk and stared at my open copy of The Canterbury Tales. I really hated the book. Mr. Burton kept saying how funny it was, but I didn’t think it was funny at all. Half the class wasn’t even reading it; they were just using SparkNotes. Even Jason, who pretty much never cut corners, had said that if he got into Harvard early, he was never reading another sentence of Chaucer again.

  I could just close the book, I thought. I could just close it.

  And do what? Spy on my mother all night long?

  I thought about my fantasy of deferring admission. Just a year to spend doing . . . what, exactly? With no classes and no homework and no finals, what would I possibly do with myself?

  I went back to reading Chaucer.

  27

  The first week of Christmas vacation, I met with my new Latin tutor twice. Jason had convinced me to stick with Latin just through the American Latin Exam, which was in January, and I figured I might as well. Plus the exam, which was given in a different place every year, was being given this year at Harvard, and Jason declared that it was a sign from God that we were meant to go. Jason believed in God about as much as I did, which is to say not at all, but I could tell he wanted us to go up there together, so I said okay. He was right—it was stupid to have worked so hard on Latin for years only to drop it now.

  It was weird to be meeting with a tutor again. The guy—his name was Adam—even looked like Glen, and he and I sat in the exact same seats Glen and I had sat in when I was working on my SATs. Adam worked for the same company Glen worked for, and he broke things down just the way Glen had, and a couple of times during our sessions, I had the strangest feeling that time was rolling backward and I’d wake up Saturday morning and have to take the SAT again. Still, after meeting only two times, I could feel myself getting better at Latin the same way I’d gotten better at SAT reading passages and math problems. These guys really knew what they were doing; if they’d had a marriage counseling arm of their tutoring business, maybe my parents would have stayed together.

  For Christmas, my mom and my brother and I met Aunt Kathy and her family at my nana and papa’s house in Connecticut. My mom always talked about how her father had built the house, which was enormous and right on a private lake, and for years I’d thought she was being literal, that my grandfather had laid the foundation himself and put up the brick walls, roofed it, put in the kitchen sinks. I don’t know when I realized he’d built it in the sense of bought the land and hired an architect and builders. My confusion wasn’t that weird considering that when I was little, my grandfather had been enormous, literally and figuratively—he was even taller than my dad, and he had a loud voice that scared me. But when I was in seventh grade, he had a heart attack and open heart surgery, and ever since then he’d been a little quieter and slower and even smaller, as if the experience had literally shrunk him.

  It was a hard visit for my mom, I could tell. Whatever my aunt had said to keep her parents away from my mom while she was in the hospital had made them nervous around her. It didn’t help that nobody was drinking, which was pretty noticeable since my grandparents were big on cocktail hour. Every other visit with Nana and Papa, we spent our evenings sitting around the huge living room in front of the fire eating nuts and having drinks. Even little kids like Andrew and William got served a tiny glass of this very sweet drink called Cherry Kijafa, and by the time I was a freshman in high school, it was assumed I’d have “my”
drink (which was always a port, one of the only alcohols that didn’t taste disgusting to me).

  Nobody said anything about there being no cocktail hour this year; we just didn’t have it. I would have liked to ask my mom if she was glad nobody was drinking or if she felt guilty, as if she was somehow spoiling everyone’s fun, but since we hadn’t acknowledged the change, I didn’t know how to bring it up. We also didn’t talk about my parents’ separation or my mother’s stint in the mental hospital. We talked about my getting into Harvard a lot. My grandfather kept telling William and Andrew that soon they’d go to Harvard, and even though my aunt and my uncle exchanged a couple of looks, nobody told my grandfather to drop it.

  On Christmas Eve day, my grandfather went for a walk with my mom while my aunt and I stayed back and helped my grandmother cook. I saw them standing on the lawn about an hour later, my mom shaking her head while my grandfather talked. When he came in, she stayed outside, and I went to find her.

  She was sitting on the swing on the back porch, looking out at the lake. It was cold, but not freezing, and I sat next to her even though I didn’t have my coat on.

  “Hi,” I said. “I think we’re having dinner soon.”

  “I guess I should get dressed,” she said. At my grandparents’ house, we always dressed for dinner.

  “Screw it,” I said. “It’s stupid to get dressed up just to eat.”

  My mom leaned her head back against the top of the swing. “I’ve always hated it and I’ve always done it. I even tried to make you kids do it when you were little. Do you remember?”

  I shook my head. “I just remember doing it here.”

  “Well, we stopped when you were about four. It was a lot of trouble.” She lifted her head and stared out across the lake, but I had the feeling she wasn’t seeing what was there so much as she was looking at the past. “It turns out making things look nice is a lot of trouble.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said abruptly.

  “What are you sorry for?” she asked. She turned to face me, but there was something vacant about her look, almost like she wasn’t seeing me. It reminded me of how she’d looked at me that day at the hospital.