My Mother Was Never A Kid (Victoria Martin Trilogy)

by Francine Pascal

  David, the boy from Philly, wrote to me when I got back to New York. It was an okay letter, nothing really personal, but he did ask when I was coming down for another visit. I wrote him and told him that I would be down for the weekend of May 17 for Liz’s birthday and that he was invited to the party. He never answered, but Liz said she saw him and he told her that he’d be there. I hope so because right now I don’t like any of the boys in my class except maybe Nickie Rostivo and he doesn’t even come up to my shoulder. He’s cute, but I feel like his mother.

  And speaking of mothers, here comes mine click click click down the hall and (without knocking) into my room to say that she and Daddy are going to drive Grandma home and then go to a movie. That means that no one will be home except Nina and me, so I ask her about answering the phone. “Nina is quite capable of answering the phone,” she says, talking in that fancy cold voice she uses when she’s angry at me. To me, the only thing Nina is quite capable of is being a huge pain in the butt. But at least she knows I’m the boss and of course the first thing I do is make her take the phone off the hook. Most of the time Nina does anything I want. I mean anything. Like one time a whole load of kids from school came back to my house and we were sitting around talking and listening to music when one of the boys got the bright idea that we ought to stage a striptease. Of course none of us were about to take off our clothes, so I got Nina and I told her, “Lucky you, you’re the star.” And you know what? The jerk actually did it. It was really hysterical with her streaking through the house stark naked. Too much. Finally she hid in the hall closet and wouldn’t come out until everyone went home. If I told her to jump off the roof she probably would. She’s so silly.

  Actually, that naked thing was probably a little much. I’ve always felt kind of bad pushing her into it like that because I think I really embarrassed her. To tell you the truth, I only hate Nina some of the time. Mostly because she can never keep a secret and drives me batty the way she’s always hanging around me and my friends. If I leave my door open even a crack she just sort of seeps in. She’s so quiet that sometimes I don’t even know she’s there, but then I’ll feel someone staring at me and ugh … she’s so weird. She even looks weird. She’s got the skinniest, boniest legs, glasses that keep slipping down her ski-jump nose, and stringy red hair. She’ll probably be okay when she grows up, but right now she’s an embarrassment. For that matter so are my parents. I just hate to have them come up to school or accompany our class on trips. I’m always worried that they’re going to do something horrible in front of everybody like take my hand when we cross the street or make me drink milk instead of Coke at lunchtime. It never actually happens, but that’s the way I feel so I hardly ever tell them about parent things at school.

  My mother is a sculptor and we have her stuff all over the house. I don’t mind that so much because she’s really pretty good at it. Last year she had two pieces in the Museum of Modern Art. Those are about the only two pieces I don’t like: They’re not really much of anything, just forms. Mostly she does heads and they usually look very lifelike. She’s done four heads of me. The ones she did when I was little are super, but the one she did last year looked more like her than me. I hated it. Another thing about my mother. She’s an absolute tennis freak and as far back as I can remember she’s been bugging me to take lessons. So finally last summer I said okay and now it beats me why she was so hot for me to learn because she hardly ever plays with me. Naturally when she does, she always beats me without even half trying. Still, I wouldn’t mind playing with her a little more. Just for the practice of course.

  My dad’s a lawyer. Not the exciting kind who works in court with murderers and juries. The dull kind. He’s into real estate law of some kind. Sometimes at dinner he’ll tell my mother a whole long story about one of his cases, and you should see how she hangs on every word. She never listens to me like that. Personally I think she’s full of baloney—about being so interested, I mean. Really, who could be so fascinated by things like tax shelters and depreciation? It’s ridiculous things like that that give me my laughing fits.

  You probably think I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about my mother and you’re right. But I can’t help it. She seems to be all over my life. Not so much my father. He’s pretty okay. Actually he can even be fun sometimes. Like with Coney Island. Every spring he takes us there for the whole day and he lets us go on any ride we want. You know how most fathers are. They just kind of stand off and watch, but not him. He goes on all the rides with us and even into those crazy horror houses. You have to see him, he’s really hysterical. We have the best time and he never makes us leave until we’re absolutely ready. He can really be pretty nice when he wants to be. But not my mother. She just ruins everything for me, always telling me what I should do and what I forgot to do, and even if by chance I did remember, how it was all wrong anyway. Thank God Grandma came today. I’ll have a whole stupendous totally free weekend where I won’t have to listen to all that junk.

  I don’t know about you, but whenever I have something special to look forward to I can’t stop thinking about it. Like this weekend and the party. I’ve been working it over in my head all week, especially at night. I lie awake for hours thinking about what I’ll wear, what I’ll say and do, and almost every little thing that could possibly happen. Even some impossible things. I create little scenes and play them over and over again like a movie in my head. Naturally I’m the star and everyone is madly in love with me and I look absolutely perfect and my dancing is spectacular (you know the kind where everyone forms a ring round you) and my conversation is the best. With dreams like that, the real party is bound to be a bomb. Most of them are anyway. I mean, like the boys stand at one end of the room messing around, punching each other on the shoulders and laughing like real jerks, and the girls sit on the other side whispering silly things about the boys. The music blasts away, but nobody dances, and it’s too loud for conversation. The only time anyone ever gets together is for a kissing game and that stinks too because most of the time you have to kiss gross guys you really can’t stand. And even if you do get to kiss someone you really like, it’s never as good as you think it’s going to be. I don’t know why I always look forward to these parties so much. But I do.

  Like with Liz’s party this weekend. I’m so anxious to get going for Philly I’m up at 6 A.M. It does my head in when that happens, but it does all the time. All I have to be is a little excited over something and either I can’t sleep or I wake up at some ridiculous hour in the morning, and then forget it, I absolutely can’t go back to sleep. Today it’s not too bad because I only have three hours to kill before the train and there’s a new hairstyle I want to try where you part it really high on the left and let this big loopy wave sort of dangle over your right eyebrow. I saw it in an old movie poster in Brentano’s—some lady named Veronica Lake, I think—and Steffi says I have just the right hair for it and that it’s very sexy and I’d look twenty years old or at least fifteen. So I can work on that in front of the mirror and then have some breakfast, and three hours aren’t that hard to kill anyway.

  The hairstyle is wild. I love it. Liz is going to die when she sees it. It’s almost seven thirty and my mother comes into the kitchen, takes one look at my hair, makes a “you-must-be-out-of-your-mind” face, and says “I hope you’re not going to wear that outside.”

  She says a couple more gems and I end up putting my hair back in a straight old parting.

  I really feel like I want to argue about it with my mother but I don’t for two very good reasons. One, I’ll lose. Two, I can always dump the old way and go back to the Veronica look on the train. But I can’t stay quiet about her next “suggestion.” She insists that my bratty little sister come with us to the station to see me off on the train. What for? Who needs her? Is the train going to stay in the station until the engineer gets the go-ahead from Nina?

  I say to my mother very reasonably:

  “I’ll vomit if she comes along.�
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  My mother responds:

  “Tell your aunt Hilda I’ll call her on Sunday.”

  I say:

  “Why does that ugly little creep have to come with us anyway?”

  She says:

  “We won’t discuss it. You should be pleased your own sister thinks enough of you to want to see you off. It’s a compliment.”

  I say:

  “She’s just doing it to spite me. She knows 1 hate every gut in her body and I don’t think it’s fair for you to drag her along just because she wants to come. What about me? I don’t want her to come. How come you always side with her?” Et cetera, et cetera. When it comes to Nina I could go on forever.

  “Finish your breakfast,” says my mother, who never cares what I think.

  That’s when I almost go into a tantrum. Luckily I catch it just in time. The next words out of my mouth are going to be, “If she comes to the station, I’m not going!” And then my mother would say, “It’s just as well, Philadelphia is too far away,” or something stupid like that and I’d have been skunked. So I smother the shriek in my throat and ram down the rest of the cereal and the troll is coming along. She’ll pay.

  You have to understand. There are times when I really don’t hate Nina. Like when she falls down and bleeds or some bully at school is picking on her or if she gets in bad trouble with my mother. But most of the time she’s a giant pain and a gross liar and she borrows without asking and she never puts back, and if she does, it’s always dirty and wrinkled, and she’s sneaky and tends to rat on other people just to save her own skin. My general policy in regard to Nina is to consider the spot she’s standing in—empty. It never works.

  Anyway, she’s coming to the station with us, and speaking of the devil, I think I hear the toad slithering into the kitchen now, ten minutes late already and naturally you have to add on seven minutes while my mother makes her wash her hands and face. Now I ask you, who in Penn Station is going to inspect her hands and face?

  But at least we’re on the move. I do a last-minute check of my suitcase to make sure I’ve got Liz’s present, my English hairbrush, and some sensational new aqua eyeliner Steffi and I found in the ladies’ room at Schrafft’s.

  “Who walks Norman?” my mother asks.

  “She does! She does!” Nina shouts, jumping up and down like some kind of a nut.

  “I already did, Mom, so tell her to mind her own business.” Of course my mother doesn’t tell her. She never does anything I want.

  We take a cab to Penn Station and Nina doesn’t even look up from her love comic all the way there. Beats me why she’s so hot to go with us.

  While my mother is buying my ticket, I put the touch on Nina. She hoards her money and always has a ton of it. All I want to borrow is five dollars, but when it comes to money she’s a miser. I can usually get anything out of her but money. I already know how I’m going to swing it. She’s wearing my argyle socks.

  “Take off my socks,” I tell her when she says no to the loan.

  “You said I could borrow them,” she says.

  “That was two days ago,” I remind her. “You were supposed to wash them out and return them yesterday.” She puts her nose back into her love comic like I’m not even there. I pull the comic away. “Take off my socks.” I have to work fast before my mother comes back, I know she’s not going to let me take the socks back now. Nina knows that too, so she starts to take them off slowly, looking around for my mother. She’s balancing on one foot, and all I have to do is poke my finger into that skinny ugly chest and down she goes. It’s so tempting, but I know she’ll howl. Still, it’s worth it. I know she’s never going to lend me the lousy money so I pretend I’m reaching for the sock and give her a little tap and whoops … there she sprawls.

  “I’m telling…. Mom!” She howls and it’s almost all one word. I can see my mother rushing over, ticket in hand. “You’re like two babies,” she says for everyone to hear. “I can’t leave you alone for two minutes blah blah blah …” She goes on in the mother voice with the mother words. Nina is crying that I pushed her. I try to explain in a calm voice that I only bumped her by accident reaching for my favorite socks which she borrowed without asking, and, anyway, I want them back right now.

  I admit it’s all pretty stupid, but I’m too far into it now to pull out. My mother threatens to return the ticket and call off the whole trip unless we stop “this very instant.” That’s not fair. Naturally I’m going to stop, but Nina’s not going anywhere so she has nothing to lose, and just to get at me, she keeps crying and pulling at the socks.

  “Give her back the comic book,” says my mother. I toss it at the gnome just hard enough so it shoots past her and lands on the floor. Big mistake. Not throwing it, but letting her see that I’m wearing her charm bracelet.

  Too late. “That’s my bracelet!” She’s practically shrieking. The whole scene is getting very embarrassing because people are stopping to stare at us and by now Nina is even more disgusting than usual with her wet-streaked face and one bare foot. “She took it out of my drawer. Make her give it back right now.”

  I wish my train were pulling into the station so I could push her under it. Crunch. It would be worth losing a good pair of argyles.

  Nina is still making wounded-buffalo sounds and by now my mother is furious. “I don’t want to hear one more word from either of you! Nina, put those socks on right this minute and meet us over there,” she says, pointing to a big round information booth in the center of one wall of the station. We both walk toward it, leaving the sniveling creep sitting on the floor pulling on my socks.

  “You call us Sunday afternoon and tell us what train you’re taking,” my mother says to me, checking the clock over the booth with her watch. It’s only a quarter to nine and my train doesn’t leave for fifteen minutes so unfortunately there’s plenty of time for instructions. “Either Daddy or I will pick you up on Sunday night right here in front of the information booth. Now look around and make sure you know where we are.” And my mother begins to point out things to help me remember where this one and only information booth right in the middle of two enormous marble pillars is. She’s too much. I stop listening when she starts to show me how it’s directly under this monster Dupont Cinerama—type advertisement right opposite the escalator. It’s not even worth reminding her that I’ve made this same trip twice in the last year and that they always pick me up in the same spot and that I’m really not a moron or a two-year-old.

  By now the troll has joined us and she’s ready for action.

  “Mommy,” Nina says, “tell her to give me my bracelet back. Mom …” Nina is the greatest whiner in the country. She has this special way of just letting her mouth hang down and making all the words seem to come directly out of her nose. My mother really hates it when she does that. You can tell by the glare on her face. I love it when Nina is on the other end of that look.

  “I don’t want to hear another word about socks or bracelets. How many times do I have to tell you, don’t lend and don’t borrow. You hear me? Now come on. Move.” And she leads the way to Track 13.

  I can’t resist a tiny grin to aggravate Nina. “Mom …,” she whines, pulling my mother’s arm. “She’s looking at me.” But my mother’s had it and she doesn’t even turn around. There are some last-minute moronic instructions and then it’s time for good-bye kisses. For my mother only. I’m just about to hop up the steps when Nina, who’s probably been busy plotting something horrible since upstairs, announces, “I need my bracelet for Emily’s party on Saturday afternoon.”

  Last week we had the word “smug” on a vocabulary test. Right now it’s on my sister’s face. I figure the best thing to do is pretend I didn’t hear her and jump on the train. Before I can, she grabs my jacket and screams, and I mean screams, “I need my bracelet!” We’re obviously everyone’s free afternoon entertainment.

  My mother says, “Give her the bracelet.” I say I want my socks.

  Sometimes in the mi
ddle of these arguments I think that I must have gone through the same fight billions of times with only one change. Sometimes it’s socks, shirts, gloves, or hats. The fight’s the same, only the item is different. It’s getting late now and everyone else is on the train and I’m starting to get nervous. But there’s no stopping now, so we go around again. Nina says she wants her bracelet, my mother says give it to her, and I say not until she gives me my socks. Now my mother is really furious and grabs the bracelet off my wrist and says, “I said give it to her.”

  It’s all so stupid, I don’t know why I do it, but I make a grab for the bracelet. I know it’s a silly move but I’m angry because it’s really unfair. My mother’s temper is gone and she smacks my hand.

  “Get on that goddamn train right this minute!” she screams at me.

  I can see the people looking at us from the train windows. The tears make me practically blind and I can hardly see to grab my suitcase. I trip up the steps to the train. She shouts something else to me but I don’t even hear her. I push through the door into the car, where everyone turns to look at me. The tears are rolling over my cheeks as I start down the aisle. Awful luck, the only empty seat is way down at the other end of the car. That means I have to walk past all these nosy people ogling at me. I don’t even care anymore. All I can think of is that my mother is the most unfair person in the whole world and I really think she’s a B-I-T-C-H and I can’t stand living with her any more. I’m not kidding, I’m really thinking of moving out. I’m steaming mad. I hate my mother and she’s ruining my life. I hate her. Hate, hate, hate.