“Mom, what do you want?” I ask.
She thinks a moment. “I want to paint,” she says. “To get back to the place in my head that lets me paint. I want to get sane, get a life. I want to quit worrying about what to do with all this stupid money.”
“Then, go paint somewhere,” I say. “You always do that when you get whacked out. What’s the big deal about doing it now?”
“You’re right,” she says. “Probably that’s what I ought to do.”
I meant she should go up to Michigan alone for a few weeks. Or maybe rent a condo someplace beautiful and warm. So I’m speechless, consumed with guilt, when she calls me a few days later to tell me she’s on her way to France.
“You were so right when you told me I should just go away,” she says, undeterred by my shocked silence. “I thought and thought about it. Then yesterday, when it was raining, I went out for a long walk and thought some more. It was so weird, like an omen. In the Village, there were all these people hurrying around under their umbrellas and I thought of that Caillebotte painting in Chicago. You know the one—
“Oh, he was such a dislikable, pigheaded man,” she rattles on. “Do you know he refused to include a single one of Berthe Morisot’s paintings in his private collection? Which, you may remember, ended up being the collection that defined Impressionism. Because she was a woman! I can’t help it, though. I still love that painting of his, and I just stood and closed my eyes and pictured it in my mind. Those beautiful umbrellas! The shine on the cobblestones, the silvery air.
“Like the air would be in Paris right now, I thought—and knew, instantly, that Paris was where I needed to be. That I needed to be alone for a while. To remember who I am, figure out where I’m going.”
All I can think to say is, “Dad?”
“We talked,” she says. “I feel bad leaving so soon after Dutch died, but I need to go. He knows that. He knows I can’t be any help to him the way I’ve been. Maybe you should come home. If you want to come home, that is. I’m sure he’d be glad for the company.”
When I remind her about Harp, she acts like having him in the house is no big deal, which freaks me out more than the news that she’s already at the airport. Driving home, I play the Red Hot Chili Peppers—loud—hoping to distract myself from thinking about the fact that Mom has been reduced to taking advice from me. When “Give It Away” comes on, it seems like some kind of cosmic message.
Of course, Dad’s in his garage. He’s sitting at his workbench, all the kit car catalogs he’d sent away for spread out before him. But he’s not really looking at them. He seems oblivious to the Corvette he’d so determinedly tracked down, parked beside him, gleaming.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah, great.” He shrugs, half-laughs. “I’ll tell you something, Emma. I’m beginning to wish we’d never gotten all that goddamn money. We were doing fine without it. We had a good life. Now we don’t know what we’re doing. I hang out in the garage, fucking around with cars like a teenager. Your mom’s bolted for a whole other country. Hell, for all I know, she might decide to stay there.”
“She’ll be back,” I say. “She can’t speak French. I mean, seriously, how long will she be able to stand not being able to express her opinion?”
But he doesn’t laugh. And to tell the truth, it doesn’t seem all that funny to me either.
I have just about as much luck cheering Jules up when she calls a while later. “I just got home and there’s this weird message from Mom about leaving for Paris this afternoon,” she says. “What’s going on, anyway? Emma, are Mom and Dad getting a divorce?”
“They’re not getting a divorce,” I say. Like I’m absolutely sure.
No way am I going to tell her about opening Mom’s dollhouse an hour ago and realizing that in the past few weeks she’d papered the walls, laid tiny strips of plywood flooring in each room, painted the trim around the doorways. She’d furnished the living room, put a little brass bed in the bedroom, and made a tiny cross-stitch quilt to cover it. She made an attic room for the children filled with books and toys; a studio for the mom that has a tiny easel with a painting propped on it, a tiny palette and paintbrushes, a wing-back reading chair. She’d set a tiny red convertible in the attached garage, near the workbench with tiny tools on it.
And when it was finished, perfect, she’d put the mother at her easel, the father on a stool at his workbench. She sat one little girl on a rocking horse, the other one on one of the beds reading a miniature Green Eggs and Ham. Then she closed it up, and left—as if she were leaving that part of her life behind her.
“It’s not like she’s never gone away before,” I say to Jules. “She was always going away to paint when we were kids.”
“But she’s never just up and left. And Paris? She’s never gone to Paris to paint! Did you talk to her?”
“Yeah,” I say. “She called me, too. From the airport.”
“And?”
I tell her what Mom told me and also that I’ve come home from Gramps’ house so I can keep Dad busy while she’s gone.
“What do you mean, busy? There is something wrong between them, isn’t there?” She sounds mad at me. Kill the messenger, I guess. I can’t blame her for being upset.
“Jules, I really don’t know. I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything, okay?”
No answer.
“Okay? Jules? Listen, I’m going to make Dad take Harp to obedience school with me. We’ll go to movies. Watch basketball on TV. Whatever. Really, I’ll keep you posted—”
More silence. Then she says, “You know, Emma, things aren’t so great here either.”
“What?” I say. “What things?”
“Everything,” she says. “Okay, everybody made a big deal about not asking why Will didn’t come for Gramps’ funeral, and I figured we had plenty to upset us without dragging out all my problems. Well, he didn’t come to the funeral because I didn’t tell him Gramps died.”
“What?” I say. “Why? What’s the deal? He liked Gramps. They got along great at Christmas. Why wouldn’t you tell him?
“I’m stupid is the deal. I didn’t want him to feel, you know, obligated. But all I did was hurt his feelings, and it wasn’t the first time either. Lately, we just haven’t been getting along very well. It’s my fault,” she says. “I don’t know what I want. I mean, I want him—I know that. Sometimes I think he’s all I want; but that can’t be a good thing. I don’t care about networking, or auditions. I just want to be with Will. But then when I’m with him, I get clingy and bitchy. I act like it’s his fault I’m so confused. My God, half the time I can’t even make myself go to dance class anymore.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Will says I need some time alone. To think. So we’re not—” Her voice gets wobbly and she falls silent.
“God, Jules,” I say. “I’m really sorry. It’ll work out, though, don’t you think?”
Silence.
“Jules?” I say.
“You always think that, don’t you, Emma? That everything works out fine for me. That everything’s easy for me.”
“No,” I say, though it does often seem that way to me. “I just meant—”
She sighs. “I know what you meant,” she says. “I’m sorry. I told you I was messed up.”
“Are you okay there, all alone?” I ask. “I mean, really?”
She sniffs.
“Jules?”
She sniffs again, so I try to make her laugh. “Too bad our communication skills have been so crappy lately,” I say. “You and Mom could have gone to France to be alone together.”
“I don’t want to go to France,” she says miserably.
“Well, what do you want?” I’m starting to feel like some kind of bogus genie, asking people what they want when I have absolutely no power what
soever to give it to them. “Do you want to come home?”
“Emma,” she says, like I’m five. “I am home. I’m a grown-up, remember? I have my own life.”
She doesn’t sound very convincing. But I know better than to argue with Jules when she gets huffy. I tell her to go out, do something. I’ve heard Mom tell her that plenty of times when she calls, feeling low. “You’re eating, aren’t you?” I add for good measure.
“Yes, I’m eating.”
“Not only frozen yogurt?”
“Not only frozen yogurt,” Jules says, finally amused.
I’m worried about her, though. I consider going to New York to try to cheer her up. But I can’t ditch Dad; and to take him along would be even worse. He hates New York. Baghdad with theater, he calls it. A few days there and who knows what kind of shape he’d be in?
What would Mom do, I wonder? She’s never been much good at things like making dinner or chauffeuring people around, but I have to say that—barring the past months—she’s gifted at disaster. Emotional traumas are her specialty. She’ll drop everything and, pretty soon, under that spotlight gaze of hers, whatever you’re freaked out about will come out in a rush. An hour later, she’ll have thought of ten things you can do to try to make it right. Or, if it can’t be made right, ten different ways to see it so that, suddenly, it seems like, however things turn out, you’ll survive.
“Interesting,” she’ll say. And pretty soon you start to see that it is.
I could call her. She’d come home on the next flight if she thought we really, truly needed her. Instead, I muddle along, checking the mail every day for a postcard or a letter from her, hoping there will be something in it to help me figure out what I should do. Finally, one of those crinkly blue airmail letters arrives, but it turns out to be mostly about a painting by Cézanne, that she stood and looked at for an hour.
It was a still life, she wrote. A square table, covered with a red and yellow and blue patterned tablecloth. On it, a blue ceramic bowl, a wine bottle with a yellow cork, a basket of yellow-green apples, and two apples sitting in front of it. The way the composition of the painting listed to the left, the three cropped paintings on the blue background—the way they seemed to have been placed randomly there—all this interested me. The pleasure in looking for so long was to discover the way the lines of the table didn’t quite match up, the way it was slightly tilted forward so that, if the apples were real, they’d roll right off of it. And I understood finally what Cézanne knew: this is the way the world actually is, everything at a tilt, improbable. As real and not real as the red blush at the bottom curve of the biteable apples made only of paint. Yet, at the same time, he thrusts life at you. Here, touch this apple. Eat it. Live.
Whatever that means.
Okay, I tell myself. Suck it up. You’re on your own.
Twenty–seven
Apparently, I’m also in charge of Dad.
When he reads the letter, he says, “You know, if it were only me, I think I’d have been perfectly happy to put the goddamn money in the bank and just be worthless for the rest of my life. Hang out in my garage. Go skiing when I felt like going skiing. Ride my Harley. Read. I should be ashamed of that, I suppose. Sometimes I think I’m just a dumb, happy person. I don’t want to go to France. I never did. I don’t give a goddamn about Cézanne, or whoever. I feel like I fail your mom that way. I know those things are important to her. I feel like if it were just her with the money she’d want to live a whole different way.”
To tell the truth, it scares the shit out of me. But I say, “Dad, there’s no point thinking that way.” Then spend the next week just trying to keep him occupied. We go to shoot-em-up movies, the kind Mom refuses to see; we go bowling, work on Harp’s obedience skills. We go out to eat every night, nothing that’s good for us. We don’t talk much. What is there to say?
The first really warm day of spring, nearly seventy degrees, I get the idea we should put the top down on the Corvette for the first time and take a drive. He shrugs but agrees to it, and we head out of town. We drive down toward Brown County and I lean back, my face lifted to the sun. The woods are greening up, brushed with redwood and violets, and the Corvette takes the turns nicely on the winding road. We stop and browse through the junky shops near the state park, eat way too much at the Brown County Inn, a homey place with red-checked tablecloths that specializes in fried chicken dinners.
Dad says, “Your mom and I once drove from trash can to trash can in the state park on a Sunday afternoon and collected enough beer cans and pop bottles to pay for dinner here when we were first married. You’d get a nickel apiece for them then. Dinner was maybe five bucks each.” He sounds melancholy, like he’ll never, ever see her again.
Back in the Corvette, we’re halfway to Bloomington before I realize that’s where he’s going. Shit. That’s my first thought. I do not want to go to Bloomington. What if I see—
Then I get this shocking little twinge of … something. What if I did see … Tiffany or Josh—maybe even Gabe Parker? My heart starts knocking inside my chest, and not only with dread. Which surprises me.
Thirteen miles, the sign says. Pretty soon the forest and fields give way to the clutter of strip malls and housing developments. Instinctively, I shrink down in my seat as we pass the College Mall, then the fraternity houses on Third Street.
“Take a walk?” Dad asks.
No! I want to say. Maybe I don’t only dread seeing Tiff or Josh or even Gabe, but that doesn’t mean I want to see them now. I don’t feel up to trying to explain that to Dad, though, so I get out of the car and set forth, my head down to avoid looking into the faces of the students hurrying to class.
If Dad notices that I’m acting weird, he doesn’t mention it. I swear, it’s as if he’s looking for Mom, half-hoping he’ll find her here, just the way she was on the day they first met. Wandering through campus, he tells me funny stories about living in the fraternity house, things he and Mom did together. I’ve heard them a million times before, but I don’t mind, because I can hear Mom chiming in, correcting, expanding them, and it’s as if she is with us. She’ll come back, I think. Eventually. How could she not?
Of course, there’s the ritual tour of the Commons, where they met. Afterwards, we check out the bookstore, where I lose myself for a little while selecting a pile of novels—then I wander into the area where the textbooks and school supplies are kept and get sideswiped by a sudden, intense desire to be a student again. I miss learning stuff. I miss studying late at night, the excitement of making connections. I miss notebooks, pens, and highlighters. The way, if you study hard enough, you can reduce a whole semester of knowledge into a list of sentences and then some kind of anagram—each letter, like a seed, that makes all you know bloom in your mind.
I want to go back to school! The sudden certainty makes me feel light-headed, but also puts me off guard so that I forget the no-eye-contact thing—and, wouldn’t you know it, at the exact moment Dad and I leave the bookstore, there’s Tiffany coming out of the bakery across the corridor.
“Emma!” she shrieks.
Of course, she has one of those huge cookies with a smiley-face on it. Which crumbles and goes all down the back of my shirt when she throws her arms around me.
“Oh, my gosh! Emma! I didn’t even recognize you at first. Your hair! It’s—well … and you’re so thin! God, I’ve missed you so much. I mean it. I’m so glad to see you.” She steps back and wags her finger at me. “So. Why didn’t you answer all those e-mails I sent you?”
“Uh—”
“You got them, didn’t you? I told Matt, I hope you got them. Like, maybe you didn’t get service way up in Michigan, where you were.”
“I got them,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”
She rolls her eyes at my language. “You haven’t changed one bit. Well, that’s a relief.”
Then, turning to Dad, she does a total Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Hello, Mr. Hammond,” she says primly. “I didn’t mean to, like, ignore you, but I just cannot believe it’s Emma right here in front of me. My goodness, Matt—that’s my boyfriend—Matt and I were just talking about her the other day. He’s riding in the Little Five Hundred, you know. For Phi Delt. And we were saying, why don’t we get Emma to come down for that.”
She swivels her head around like a chicken to look at me again. “And suddenly you just—appear! Like you’re always saying: cosmic! So why don’t you come?” she says. “I’ll hardly see Matt all weekend, and I need you to keep me company. Really. I do. Please! It’s this Saturday. You can come down Friday and stay in our room.”
Our room. For a second, I believe it still is. Honestly, when Tiffany gets on one of her talking jags, she can get me so confused I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. Then I remember that if I go to Little Five with her, I’m bound to see Josh and Heather.
Not to mention Gabe Parker—which makes me feel like I just hit my emotional crazy bone. Hard. It all floods back into me: the coffee date, the Winnebago debacle—the way I felt in his presence. The very scary fact that I really, really want to see him again.
But there’s no way I’m actually ready for it. I give Dad a pointed look, like, save me.
But he just laughs. “Go,” he says. “Jesus, get out, do something. Quit hanging around with old farts like me.” He looks as amused as I’ve seen him look since Mom took off for France.
What can I do? I tell Tiff, “Yeah, okay, I’ll come.”
Twenty–eight
Sure enough. I walk through the door of our room—upon which Tiffany has spelled out WELCOME HOME, EMMA in daffodil stickers—and within five minutes she informs me there’s a big dance at the Phi Delt house tomorrow night, a beach party, and we’ll all be going together.
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