by Jen Larsen
Flora says to me, “Well congratulations!” and I almost say thank you but my grandmother interrupts with, “She hasn’t gotten in yet.”
“It’s just an interview,” I mumble.
“Well that’s still just great,” she says. “We have a ton of suiting separates right back here.” She turns and waves us along behind. My grandmother runs her eyes across the few racks and nods, but Flora doesn’t recognize being dismissed. “Well, see, here there are a ton of options and if you can’t find your size I’ll be happy to help you figure something out. I’ll just set up a fitting room for you right now and then you can get to work.”
“Thank you,” I say to her. Grandmother is flipping through the racks already, ignoring both of us. Soon I’m loaded up with one of every size of every piece in this section. I duck into the room but my grandmother is right behind me, and she places herself on the padded stool in the corner.
“I can try on things myself,” I say to her. “I’ll come out and show you.”
“This is more efficient,” she says. “Go on.”
I turn my back when I lift my shirt and it feels like I am peeling off my skin, leaving behind raw red hamburger that hurts in the open air. I start at the smaller sizes and go up and I don’t look in the mirror, I look at my grandmother who does not say a word to me, just shakes her head or nods and in the end, we have two pairs of pants, two jackets, four button-down shirts.
I bang open the door of the dressing room. “Ashley,” my grandmother says sharply but I keep going, pushing through the front doors and breathing the hot afternoon air. It doesn’t feel as hot as the skin all over my body. Or the tears streaming out of the corners of my eyes. I try rubbing them away with the heels of my hands before my grandmother can see but I can’t keep up.
When she comes out I don’t know how many minutes later she smiles at me. She doesn’t say anything about my red wet face. She just hands me the bag and goes around the side and unlocks the car. All the way home I sit with the bag in my lap and she talks about how we can salvage this and I don’t ask “salvage what,” but I nod and say yes and make noises similar to yes but I can’t really hear her.
When we pull into the driveway, she turns the key and the car gets immediately too hot with the sun beating down on the windshield. She turns to me and says, “That reminds me! For when shall I schedule the pre-operative appointment?”
All of me wants to pretend that I have no idea what she’s talking about but I am not stupid or twelve.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t want to—”
She pats my hand. “I know, darling,” she says. “It is hard to let go of old, wrong ideas. Especially for someone as stubborn as you.” She smiles at me. “You get that from me.” She checks her lipstick in the rearview mirror, and then smiles at me again. “You finally know how important this is. You’re better than your mother ever was, and I am determined to give you every possible advantage.” She opens her door and slips out, taps up the stone path in her kitten heels.
I haven’t promised anything, I think. I haven’t promised anything. I follow behind her with the bag in my arms, tripping up the stairs and into the dark coolness of the house.
CHAPTER 15
I’m surprised at how glad I am to see Hector’s face peering around the giant potted palms that separate the foyer from the rest of the restaurant. Relieved. We’ve never gone so long without talking. I have wanted badly to call him, to confess to him, tell him about San Francisco, about this new version of my mother I’ve had to carry around in my head, that I’ve been shying away from—that she didn’t leave because she was too good for us. She left because she wasn’t good enough.
But I have been fighting the urge to call because I need to know that I am enough on my own. I can’t let him be my center support. I have never noticed before how much I had relied on him to see all of me and still love me and ratify who I am. It scares me.
It’s the busiest time of the Sunday rush though, the four-o’clock early-dinner crowd full of seniors and parents with kids they want to get into bed in a couple of hours. I lift my pitcher of water in a salute to him, and he smiles when he sees me. Dimples.
Water runs down my arm and on to Mr. Monroe’s bread plate, but he doesn’t notice because he’s focused on buttering another piece of sourdough. I am tired and my feet hurt and I’m trying to let the orders I need to remember crowd out everything else but that never works the way you want it to.
“Amy,” I say to the server at the next table over. “Amy,” I say again, and she startles and swings around.
“Hi. What,” she says. She looks like a mushroom to me, with a triangle of hair and a soft square face that never changes expression.
“I’ll be right back, okay?” I say. I try to hand her the water pitcher, but she just looks at it. “Can you take this?” I say. “I’m just going to be a second.”
“No,” she says, and turns back to her table full of sunburned tourists, all peeling and dressed like they’ve been standing on a boat letting the sea air blow through their clothes.
I know if I look at any of my tables someone is going to try and catch my eye so I keep my head down and sidle among all of them, dripping water all the way across the carpet. Hector is examining the leaves of the palm tree, pinching the ends as if he is trying to determine whether they’re real, and looking like he’s going to pull off one entirely.
“Don’t mess with the palm tree,” I say to him, but he doesn’t laugh at me. He is not even smiling anymore. His face is so still and serious that he looks like a bad photograph of himself. “What is it,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look sad. That’s what this expression is, and it catches me off guard.
“I was going to text you,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He swallows and his throat bobs. I want to touch the side of his neck where it meets his shoulder, that cord of muscle, but I am still holding a water pitcher.
“You mean what happened at lunch on Thursday? It’s fine. I haven’t been thinking about it.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Sort of.”
I glance over my shoulder and I see Amy staring at me as she deals out the bread bowls for one of my tables. “Do you want to talk after work?” I say. I should be walking the dogs and cleaning the kitchen and finishing a paper for Literature, not wandering off again, but I shove that thought away.
“No,” he says. “I can’t wait that long. I went to your house but your grandmother said you were working and I had to talk to you.” He still hasn’t smiled and he’s not looking at me and he is the most transparent person I’ve ever known.
“Are you breaking up with me?” I say.
Relief like the dawning of the sun across his face, then sadness chasing after it. “You’re not happy,” he says, and I am silent. “You know, I just want you to be happy. But you aren’t and I don’t want to hang around making you more unhappy.”
I am still holding the water pitcher. He is looking at me very earnestly. He says, “Say something.”
“Okay,” I say. My grandmother’s voice in my head: Why are you surprised? He’s finally woken up. Isn’t this what I’ve been telling you all along? “What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything,” he says. “It wasn’t anything you did.”
“Okay,” I say. I am standing there in my apron and there is sweat in my cleavage and Hector is breaking up with me. It’s nothing I said. It was nothing I did. It’s me.
He’s shifting from foot to foot now, anxious.
“Are you going to get mad?” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this a ton, Ashley.”
“For how long?” I say.
“Well, you’ve been unhappy for a while,” he says. “But I didn’t realize it was me until Friday.”
“Thursday,” I correct him.
“No, when you weren’t in school on Friday and you didn’t text me at all to tell me where you were and I was going to text you and then—it was like an epiphany.”
“Okay,” I say.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and peers into my face. “Don’t you think this is a good idea?” he says.
Did I think it was a good idea that he was breaking up with me, instead of me breaking up with him? Because that’s how it’s supposed to go. He’d laugh like a monkey or say something stupid or just be Hector and not a person in the world would have faulted me for it. Everyone would have understood.
But now everyone will just assume they understand why he broke up with me. They’ll look at me and nod and say yes, of course. How could he look at her every day? And I am weak with this idea, the horrific exposed feeling of it, and all the words have blown out of my head.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. I can’t figure out anything else to say, so I say, “I’m going to go back to work.” I lift the pitcher, dripping with condensation, to show him that I was working. My hand is shaking and the ice is clinking against the sides.
“Okay,” he says. He reaches out, and then pulls his hand back, and then pats me on the shoulder.
He broke up with me, I think. I turn and hop back through the maze of tables with the pitcher dribbling down into the crook of my arm, and keep going, right into the dark pass-through so I don’t have to look at all the tables I’m supposed to be handling, and all those faces. Amy stomps over and says, “Done?” and I say, “Yes,” and surprise myself when I burst into tears.
She sighs disgustedly and grabs one of the rolled-up napkins from the top of the stack. It’s still got silverware in it when she hands it to me, and it all clatters to the rubber mat when I unroll it. She leaves me there to sniffle, but it was only a short burst. A summer thunderstorm, rattling the windows and making the house creak.
I don’t need him to remind me that I am fine the way I am, just fine. I don’t.
I should tell someone, I think, and pull my phone out of my pocket. But before I unlock it I realize I can’t. I can’t tell anyone that he broke up with me, left me behind feeling like I was floating in the middle of the ocean on an inner tube, my legs disappearing into the dark water below me.
CHAPTER 16
I haven’t seen Laura in a week—since our trip to San Francisco. She hasn’t been in school at all, as far as I know. I’ve texted her. WHAT’S UP WITH OMAR? She never texts back. I’ve backspaced so many texts to her after just one letter because I have no idea what the next letter is.
Jolene is still staying with us. And she keeps telling me to call Laura and I nod but never do and when Laura shows up at the front door I have to assume that Jolene went ahead and did it for me.
“Interview for Harvard,” Laura said, standing on the top step now. “Full speed ahead.”
“Oh yeah I’m on the fast track now!” I say brightly, and she frowns. I’m making jokes. She doesn’t say anything about it though. We sit in my bedroom the way we always do, a pile of dogs and all of us talking about the easiest subject—when I’m leaving for the interview and how long I’m staying and where I’ll be sleeping. “And with who, ha ha,” I say, nudging Jolene in the side.
“I’m sorry about Hector,” Laura says.
I shrug. I can’t explain the hole he has left, how desperately I’m trying to backfill it. I touch the DNA charm dangling at my chest.
“Do you want me to go with you?” Laura says. She’s sitting on the floor with Annabelle Lee in her lap, flapping her tiny ears up and down in rhythm. Annabelle Lee is content to be mauled.
“No,” I say. “I’ll be okay.”
“You could stay with my aunt maybe,” Laura offers. “On my mom’s side, so that could be awkward, but still.”
“Maybe,” I say. I have been looking forward to the idea of a hotel room and a giant bed and a tub with water pressure and where the water isn’t kind of orange.
Laura stands up with Annabelle Lee under her arm. Annabelle Lee hangs there in a very dignified way. “What are you going to wear?” Laura says. She goes to my closet and starts pulling out blouses, T-shirts, dresses, with her other hand, throwing them on the bed.
“I have a suit,” I say, but Laura doesn’t stop going through my clothes.
She says, “Where’s your suitcase?” and I dig it up and she says, “This is so small.” She’s tossing a pile of stuff in it. I stop myself from trying to catch the things that flap through the air, put my closet back together.
“There,” she says, satisfied. “I wonder if it closes.” She sets Annabelle Lee down and swings the lid closed. It doesn’t close. She yanks on the zipper but it catches in one of the sweaters she packed. Toby pads over to sniff at the zipper and I shoo him away. I hadn’t even realized I had sweaters but I suppose Boston might be a cold place in November. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Laura says, and punches the side of the suitcase.
I snort. “I think you overpacked.”
She throws herself across the suitcase and makes irritated grunting noises while she tugs hard on the zipper again. She looks very artistic in the motes of dust that sweep through the sunbeam illuminating her skin to dark copper and her hair shining black-gold.
“A little help here,” she says.
“You have to take some things out.”
“No,” she says. “You need options.”
“It’s just a carry-on,” I say, but she is still tugging. “I have enough options,” I say. “I have plenty of options now.” I try not to think of the Lane Bryant dressing room and the dressing-room mirror and the feeling of not being able to breathe.
“Now you do,” she says. “You’re welcome. Jolene, please come sit on this suitcase. No, stand on it. Stand on it and jump.”
Jolene sits up on the bed but I jump up first. “Don’t break my suitcase!” I say. It’s my mother’s ancient plaid hard-sided one. The satiny green-gold lining inside is fraying and a little loose and it smells like mothballs and thrift-store clothing and everything I wear will smell like that too, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any other appropriate bag to bring for my interview trip. And here is my stomach again, a clenched fist, a helpful reminder from deep inside my body that I am not just a brain in a jar.
I sit down hard. “I don’t want to go,” I say.
“We know,” Jolene says, swinging her legs against the side of the mattress. She has not been sleeping again, and it is like I’m watching her slowly sink every day. I had told her, “I got the Harvard interview,” when I came home with the big Lane Bryant bag and she had said, “Congratulations,” and then drifted back upstairs with her mug of tea.
“It’s important to be honest,” I say.
“We know,” Jolene says, and her heel bangs against the bedframe. “Ow,” she says.
Laura is still grunting at the suitcase and I stand up again.
“I have an idea,” I say. I poke Laura in the side with my toe. “Move it, move it.” I push with the ball of my foot until she rolls off and lies sprawled on the rug, panting.
“You’re not smarter than me,” she says.
I drag the suitcase to the middle of the floor and dump it on its side. I pick up the curated list from my desk. “One pair of black slacks,” I say, and Laura sighs dramatically, flops onto her back spread-eagle.
“Hooray for gratitude,” she says.
“Did you put underwear on your list?” Jolene says. “I think Laura forgot to pack underwear.” She’s standing up and reaching for the dresser but I swing around.
“No, I got it, I’m good,” I say. The idea of someone looking at my drawer full of tucked and rolled underwear in a rainbow of colors makes me nervous, somehow.
“Do you have your laptop?” Laura asks.
“Of course I have my laptop.”
“I meant on your packing list. Something to read?”
“I have my laptop,” I say. “Things to read are on it.”
“Can you even use a laptop on a plane?” Jolene says to Laura.
“I have my calculus book,” I say.
Laura rolls her eyes.
“Did you submit your appli
cation essay yet?” Jolene says.
I stop in the middle of tucking a pile of underwear into a dark recess of the carry-on. “No,” I say. Because I have this terrible feeling that if I sit down and write, I’ll do something stupid like pour out my heart. Birthday coupons and my body and this growing, aching fear that I’m not the person I think I am.
“Oh, hell. Give me her laptop,” Laura says. “I’ll do it.”
“I just—haven’t finished it yet,” I say with my head inside the suitcase.
There’s a long silence.
I pull my head out. “I haven’t started the essay yet,” I say.
“Don’t you need to have the application finished—don’t they need to have you as a candidate, on the rolls, ready to go, to actually conduct the interview?” Laura asks.
I interrupt her. “Back off. Like you give a shit if I get into Harvard—”
“I don’t give a shit about where you go,” she says. “End up in community college if you want. Fuck up your fancy life plan.”
And that is about all I can take.
“And how’s your life plan?” I say. “Shouldn’t you be up in San Francisco fucking Omar in his crack house?”
“Oh, Omar!” she says. “Yes, Omar. My ex-boyfriend who was really excited you burned down his fucking art show.”
“I didn’t burn it down,” I say, and then I kick my suitcase. “It wasn’t even an art show! It was a bunch of underemployed date rapists pretending to know shit-all about photography, and Omar being useless.”
“Luckily for you, you didn’t have to date him.”
“Lucky for you he dumped you. Hey maybe you can actually do something with your life now.”
Laura laughs. “I love how you spend your whole existence telling everyone else what to do, when you have no idea what the hell you’re doing.”
“What are you even talking about?” I snap.
“You are so lost right now you’re off the map. You totally pushed Hector away because you couldn’t deal with the fact that he sees through you and still gave a shit anyway, and you’ve finally bought into your grandma’s insane ideas, and for someone who thinks she’s completely together and knows exactly who she is and what she wants? You are a big fucking mess.” She’s breathing heavily and her fists are clenched at her sides now.