Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  A car alarm goes off on one of the subbasement floors. We let its bleating take the place of our talking. When it stops, my father says, “I’ve always thought you might like to spend more time with your mother, that’s all,” and shakes his head.

  “I’m happy here,” I say. “I’m happy in New York.”

  He nods and touches the back of my head affectionately, but he doesn’t believe me; I can tell by the furrow still between his eyebrows.

  Since their divorce eight years ago, my parents have been shuttling me back and forth between their apartments, and for the past three years, between New York and Paris, where my mother has taken a research fellowship of indeterminate length at the Bibliothèque nationale, ostensibly writing a book. When she left, I moved in with my father and his second-chance family—new wife, new baby. I’ve never shaken the feeling that he thinks my stay is just temporary.

  In the car, my father maintains his strained, guilty silence until he turns on the signal for the airport exit. Then he reminds me, as he likes to periodically, that I don’t have to be afraid of Jill and Jack, not on this trip. In this way we share the same deluded hope that this time will be different. He hopes I won’t call him in tears asking to come home early, like I did last time, after waiting three hours in a cold spring rain for them to show for a lunch they’d both forgotten about. I can still hear him asking me why I had waited so long, a scolding disguised as empathy. But what I hope is that despite seventeen years of feeling like an outsider, on this trip I’ll finally find a way in, that I’ll stop feeling like an only child.

  “I’m not afraid,” I say, which is a lie, but I know it’s what he wants to hear, though he’s not really listening. At the mere thought of them his face has gone hard and defeated, reliving all the anger and suspicion and fear he once had toward them, and the shame that goes along with having those feelings for your own children. He nearly misses my terminal.

  At the curb, when I’ve gathered my bags, his look softens. He pats my shoulder one last time and says, “Be good,” as he always does when I leave him, because he knows I will be, because I am not one of his older children, because being good is all I know how to do.

  • • •

  When I see my older brother and sister, John and Jillian—Jack and Jill, as they have always been called—waiting beyond the customs gate at Charles de Gaulle with my mother, my chest tightens. They are like beautiful puzzle pieces, with interlocking features of high cheekbones and broad, easy smiles, the same shade of ashy blond hair tucked behind their ears. My mother still introduces them as Irish twins, no matter how many times Jill reminds her that no one says that anymore. Born less than a year apart, Jack on Jill’s heels, they are as close as if they did share a womb, always in each other’s friends and lives. Their shared witness of our family’s disintegration, the fights I don’t recall (including one, they claim, over my being born at all), when they were old enough to understand (or, as my father’s new wife says, “know better”), bound them to each other. They always stand behind one another, no matter who stands against them. To me, their fierce loyalty is the inaccessible nucleus of our family.

  I expect them to wave and keep walking, as they used to when I was little, shouting to me across the crosswalk that they wouldn’t be home for dinner, laughing as they receded, while I headed home. But they don’t. Jack takes my bags; my mother pushes my hair out of my face to get a look at me. Jill slings her arm over my shoulder and draws me to her, as if she has been waiting to see me, and while this feels like a mistake—a show, perhaps, for our mother—I let myself sink into her unexpected affection.

  In seconds, Jack is under her other arm, laughing at some inside joke of theirs from their mere hours together on French soil. Within a few steps Jill releases me from her grip and I drift back to my mother, who takes my hand and squeezes it. “Here you are,” she says to me.

  “Here I am,” I say.

  • • •

  We go to a late dinner to celebrate my arrival. Jill has been in Paris for a few days already, on vacation from the small, menial jobs she takes and leaves like a series of wrong turns; Jack, since last night. From behind the rim of my glass, I study them as they lean in over their menus. I don’t know my brother and sister well, despite these quarterly trips to Paris. While I spent my childhood perfecting how not to be a problem, Jack and Jill were at boarding school, at special summer camps for troubled youth, with tough-love therapists and patient aunts in California. Jill puts down her menu and catches me looking at her; we trade nervous smiles. I fill with the hope that rises up in me at the start of each of these trips: hope that our family can take a form here that we never could in New York, that whatever collective grievances Jill and Jack hold against my parents have faded and won’t be used to seal themselves off from the rest of us, that they’ll finally see that I can be on their side, too. Maybe it will take longer for us to scatter to different parts of the city as we usually do—Jill and Jack together of course, and I, my mother’s sidekick while she pretends that all is fine.

  My mother orders champagne; the first glass of it fills my head like a balloon. When it’s near-empty, the waiter asks if we want another bottle. Jill says yes. “We might as well, right?” She winks right at me.

  When we’re done with the meal, Jack takes out a cigarette. He tips the pack toward Jill.

  “Don’t anymore.”

  “Really?”

  “Five months,” she says.

  “That’s great,” Mom says, reaching over to pat Jill’s hand approvingly. “Now’s the time to quit, while you’re young.” Her eyes are glassy from the champagne.

  “By week’s end, you’ll be back,” Jack says before sliding the pack into his coat pocket, his mouth crumpled into childish displeasure.

  Mom turns to me, asks, “How’s your dad doing?” My father will ask about her when I return, these public displays of civility part of the play they’ve put on for me since the split.

  “Oh, yes, how is Father?” Jill’s voice is heavy with sarcasm. Jill lives in New York, too, but we don’t see her much; she and my father like it that way.

  “He’s fine. You know. He drove me to the airport.”

  “Did he bring the worm with him?” Jill crosses her eyes and wiggles her finger up and down, making Jack snicker.

  “The worm” is their nickname for our half sister, Hope; she’s four now. My father brings her along when he doesn’t know what to say to us.

  “No, just us.”

  “Lucky you,” Jack says. Jill laughs, snorting a bit as she takes a sip of water.

  My mother is too busy counting out bills from her wallet for the check, her eyes squinting in concentration, to say anything.

  The four of us walk home that night along the Seine, waving giddily at the Bateaux Mouches, the big tourist boats, as they pass.

  • • •

  The next day, my mother meets me in the Luxembourg Gardens for lunch. I bring us sandwiches from her favorite boulangerie, near the apartment. We sit on green metal chairs, watching the birds in the fountains, watching people.

  “You know, I was thinking maybe you’d want to come here for the summer,” she says as she unwraps the paper from her sandwich. She tried to get me to stay with her last summer.

  “Maybe.” I don’t want to make another trip; I want her to come home. The longer my mother works here, the older she looks, the stranger she dresses, and, I think, the happier she becomes.

  “How is the book?” I ask her. She seems busier than she was during our last visit—more time at the library, longer hours.

  “Good, really good,” she says as she hands me a napkin, catching a tomato sliding out from my baguette. “The research part of it’s almost done. Now comes the writing.”

  “You can do that at home, can’t you? In New York?”

  My mother puts her sandwich in her lap and takes my
hand between hers. “Caitlin, look, I’m selling the New York apartment.”

  I spent my childhood in that apartment; we stayed in it after the divorce. A couple is renting it now with all the furniture, and when I walk by there on my way to flute lessons I think of them and their two young children, living a life we never had in its walls—quiet, harmonious, intact. I probably won’t see the apartment again, won’t absentmindedly smooth the paper that’s peeling back toward the walls, won’t get a salute from Boris, the weekend doorman, or wait for the telltale flicker of the elevator lights before our floor.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Paris is my home now.”

  “But it’s not mine.”

  “It could be, if you’d let it.”

  I look at my mother in this park in Paris where walking across the grass is a crime, at her soft, proud face, and I think, What could she know about home, about families, this woman who moved thousands of miles away from her own? I shake my head. “Don’t you care about where I want to be?”

  “Of course I care.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way.”

  I pull my hand from hers, return to my sandwich. It’s a beautiful late-fall day, and the park is full of people having lunch, reading Le Monde, of tourists snapping photos under the foliage at the Medici Fountain. The voices of foreigners are all around me, speaking French and German and Japanese and Czech. My mother’s voice, as she tries to explain why the move is good for all of us, is the only one I can understand. I let it bleed into the others, let it become foreign.

  • • •

  I don’t expect to see Jack and Jill at the apartment, but they’re there, finishing their own sandwiches at the small counter that divides the kitchen from the rest of the living space.

  “What happened to you?” Jack asks.

  “She’s selling the apartment, in New York,” I say, taking off my coat.

  “That’s too bad,” he says, crumpling up the paper from his sandwich and aiming it at the trash can.

  “Thank God,” Jill says. “That place is cursed.”

  “Jill.” Jack thwacks her on her shoulder with his knuckles, indicates me with his head.

  “It’s okay,” I say, too quickly, because I don’t want them to feel sorry for me.

  “Oh, come on,” Jill says to Jack. “The worst years of our childhood happened after we moved into that apartment.” We moved a year after I was born. “I think Caitlin can handle that not all of us have fond memories of it.”

  “Sure I can,” I say, and pull my calculus textbook from my backpack in the living room. I take a seat at the end of the counter.

  Jack peers over my shoulder. “You’re sad and you’re doing math?” He shakes his head.

  Jill reaches over him and closes my textbook. “No, no homework today. We need to do something fun. We need an adventure.”

  I’ve been trained by my parents to think that my difference in disposition from Jill and Jack is best for me—that I’m too young, too good to get mixed up in the trouble they always seem to get into, but all I’ve ever wanted is to go where they go without me.

  That afternoon, Jack and I follow Jill from shop to shop, letting her dress us like dolls. She wraps Jack in scarves until she finds one she deems acceptable, a stretch of steel gray cashmere she carefully coils around his neck. “So handsome,” she gushes, and she means it. Jack nods in appreciation.

  For me, Jill chooses shoes from a small shop in the Marais. They are a warm pink suede, slim and sophisticated, with a tiny heel. When I look at myself in the store mirror, my jeans pulled up to reveal ankles marked by sock elastic, it seems the top and bottom parts of myself are two different people: the ponytailed, lightly freckled face of a child, and the calves of a woman now shaped by the small lift of that heel. Jill smiles at me in the mirror.

  “They’re beautiful,” she says.

  “They’re more you. You should try them on.”

  “No, they’re yours. We’ll get them.”

  I stand in bare feet as she puts them back in the box, tucking the tissue paper over them. She pays for them with Mom’s credit card.

  • • •

  At my mother’s request, I stop at the library before dinner the next night. It’s empty of its tourists and most of the other scholars, of the people who have people to go home to at night. Before we go into her private reading room, we wash our hands in the small bathroom down the hall. There’s only one sink, and we let our hands run under the tap at the same time, the way we used to when I was a child.

  In the study room, the walls are stenciled in French with the rules for handling the materials, the nes stacking up neatly, a tower of don’ts. There’s a laptop, its screen dark, on a pile of books on one desk. “Come here; I want to show you something,” my mother says, her voice soft and secretive, as though I’m still a girl. On a large table at the other end of the room, an open manuscript waits, fragile and faded and beautiful. We slide on pairs of cotton gloves, and she nods me toward it.

  Saint Agnes, she explains, one of the patron saints of girls, the subject of her book. Agnes, beautiful and rich, was a prize, even at twelve. But she chose God over men, religion over marriage. She feared no punishment; she refused the offers of marriage that would have saved her from public humiliation, her eventual beheading. When given one last chance, brought into the temple to worship the goddess the Romans then revered, she crossed herself instead.

  “For that, she was tortured, shamed, killed, of course.” My mother clicks her tongue. “No sense of self-preservation, those saints,” she says, and smiles.

  There’s a sword at Agnes’s throat, but Agnes, pious, haloed, looks calm, accepting; this manuscript is one of only a handful to depict her like this. It’s rare, my mother says, to see such an image of her. “Mostly, they like to show her with lambs.”

  “It’s nice,” I say after a pause, unsure what she wants me to say.

  “It’s special, and I wanted you to see it. Just you.”

  She gives me this look I recognize from the divorce, the one that asks for my silent understanding, to be on her side. I was only seven then, when the family really started to fall apart. I can still see her so clearly by the phone in the hall, a hand covering her forehead, asking, “Where?” already reaching for her coat and keys on their hooks. And then she’d give me that weak smile that asked me not to have seen anything at all, because by then she’d stopped telling my father about those phone calls, about the places she’d go to pick up Jill and Jack: police stations, store security offices, and once, when he was away on a business trip, the outermost tip of Long Island; she’d had to rent a car to bring them back that time. “He isn’t built for children,” she said to me one night, sitting on the edge of my bed. I’d woken up because my father had found out about one such omission and pounded a fist against the dining room wall, which was also the wall to my bedroom. “Your brother and sister, they’re just too much for him.” The rings under her eyes suggested they were too much for her, but she never said so. She tucked the covers in firmly, as if to hold me in place.

  She shuts off the light above the manuscript. “I think I’m going to skip dinner tonight; I’m not too hungry anyway. But you guys go, and have a good time.” My mother loves the library at night, its promised emptiness. She’s made friends with the night guards, who check on her before they go off shift. “You know how it is; I just get so caught up in it.” She gestures to the room around her. She forgets I am only seventeen, that I do not know how anything is.

  She reaches for her purse and pulls out some cash. “Take a cab to dinner, won’t you?”

  I take the money from her, but I walk. My new shoes, which she did not notice, still feel good on my feet, and it’s only a few blocks to the restaurant.

  At dinner, Jack and Jill’s way of looking out for the hurt that must be on my face is to keep ordering wine
. Un de plus, un de plus, they say, touching the tip of the empty carafe each time.

  Jill holds the lip of a fresh carafe over my glass, which is still half-full. “You want more?” she asks, but this is not really a question. It’s a test, a dare, an invitation.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “’Atta girl,” Jack says, and they both beam their smiles onto me.

  After a few glasses of wine, Jack begins to tell stories from their adolescence, of the years during the divorce, of the places they’d run off to—the park, mostly, and friends’ houses, and candy stores on the East Side, where they’d have competitions to see who could pocket the most candy.

  “It wasn’t as much fun as he makes it sound,” Jill says as she exhales smoke from the side of her mouth—her first cigarette in five months. “I mean, we also used to pretend we were orphans.”

  “It was fun, and you know it,” Jack says, and tips the pack of cigarettes to me. Jill swats it away. “Dad would kill you,” she says to both of us, and I leave the cigarettes alone.

  We stay out drinking till the waiters start lifting chairs onto the tables to sweep underneath. We walk out into the crisp night of fall drunk, full, pleased with ourselves. We decide to head to the Louvre to see the pyramid all lit up. Jack has the remainders of a bottle of wine he swiped from a table before the waiters got to it tucked into his peacoat.

  They whisper the plan to me, my brother in one ear, my sister in the other, as if they are speaking to one another through me. “So when the cab stops, you run,” Jill says, smoothing my hair back behind my ear. “We’ll come find you,” Jack assures me as he hails a cab over to us. They shut the door before I can protest. I’m too drunk to say otherwise.

  I can see the cabby’s jowls shake as he looks for the corner Jill has told him to stop at, a false address she delivered in her best French, with a smile.

  When the moment comes, Jack tries to pull me in his direction by my jacket, but I freeze. I run away from the cab, back in the direction we’ve come from, to look for a bridge the cab can’t cross, or a dark place to hide and wait for my siblings to come find me.