“Probably when you least expect it or not until something else big happens, like when Rosenberg loses her virginity or something.”
We laugh, and I hug her. Years later, she came to one of my readings in Brooklyn. Her face was as bright and beautiful as ever, her hair still long and blond. She was in a winter jacket and had a copy of my book in her hand. She came in a little late and waited until the reading was over. We spoke for a while, and she told me how proud she was of me, that she envied how I was able to write about my experiences. She hugged me, and I was brought back to our friendship, the sweetness of it. Even though she broke apart from the friend group, I never held it against her. We were a lot to handle. In a way, she was too good for us, but I never hated her for that.
She of course asked me about Jensen. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just told the truth—that I wished her the best.
Tomassi and I break apart. I take a square of toilet paper and fix my makeup in the mirror. The rest of the day, I deal with cramps and try to convince myself that it’ll get better soon, that things will really start to change.
• NINETEEN •
Spring passes by so fast. It feels like there’s no time some days. I wake up early for school, sit in class for seven hours, then come home, do homework, watch a show with my family, then go to sleep. I’m tired all the time, and I wish I could have a break—a day, a week—to just sit in bed and sleep. This feeling re-emerged in college. I was walking home from class on a cold day when it started to snow, and I didn’t have on the right jacket. The light made it hard to tell the time of day. Some of my friends were studying abroad, but I wanted to finish quickly so I could go become the thing I was meant to be. So I stayed in the Midwest, with cornfields and football games. It felt endless, infinite. I wanted it to be over, but the next day would come and it was still happening.
Then, all at once, it was over. I didn’t walk with everyone else at graduation but instead came home early and had my diploma mailed to me. It sits in my closet, and years later my master’s degree would sit right next to it. Back then, my life felt like it was about to start, not yet at the important part, but now I wish I had been mindful of the world around me and noticed it as much as possible. I wish I had found joy in that instead of rushing through it.
I come home from school one day and find my mom has arranged driving lessons for me. I really just want to nap and write, but a tall man named Hank Garfield, whose last name happens to be the same as my favorite cartoon character, stands in the driveway. My mom tells me to get my permit and get in the car.
“Why can’t you just teach me how to drive?” I ask her.
“We used Hank with Brad,” she says. “You’ll be fine.”
“But I want you to do it.”
“I can’t deal with the attitude anymore,” she says, and offers a hand to take my backpack. I give it to her and put my permit in the pocket of my school uniform pants. Because I have my period again this week, I’m wearing pants, the dark blue pair that’s too tight on my waist but too big in the butt, so I have to leave them unbuttoned so I can breathe and I tug at them all day to keep them up. I put my hair in a ponytail and get in the driver’s seat.
The car is rigged with an extra set of brakes on the passenger side. It’s the ugliest car I’ve ever seen, bright orange, with Hank’s Driving School painted on the sides. I hope I don’t see anyone I know.
Hank shows me how to make turns, how to signal before I am turning, and then how to proceed to engage in an actual turn. He sort of looks like Luigi from Super Mario Bros. and smells like the soppressata my dad buys at the deli. He tries to make a joke about how he only uses the extra brakes on his students and his wife, but I’m actually pretty nervous and don’t laugh. I stay quiet and do everything he tells me to. The lesson goes fine until we get back into my neighborhood. I attempt to make a left turn out of a subdivision, and the right wheel goes over a curb. The car rises and falls with a solid thud. I forget to pump the brakes and freak out. Hank uses his spare set and tells me to brake as well. I don’t. I take my hands off the wheel.
“Get your hands back on the wheel!” Hank yells. “Ten and two!”
I sit motionless, in shock. The car is stopped in the middle of the road. Luckily, no one’s around. It’s a neighborhood road, so it doesn’t count anyway.
“Can you drive?” I ask Hank.
“We’re right around the corner from your house. You can do it.”
“Was that bad?”
“It wasn’t good,” he says, then laughs. “It happens. Just take us back to your house.”
“I’m really tired. I didn’t want to do that last turn. I don’t see why I had to. I was done. I could have just been done.”
“When you get your license and you’re in your own car, you can’t take breaks when you’re tired. I won’t be there. You won’t have other people to do things for you.”
“I can do it, I just don’t want to right now. I’m shaken up.”
“You’re fine. It was only a curb.”
“I want you to drive.” I start to cry.
Hank gets out of the car and comes around to the driver’s side. He opens the door and we switch places. The drive back to the house takes less than a minute.
When we arrive, my mom is in the driveway with her checkbook. She pays Hank, and I wait in the garage. I overhear him say something about “a little hiccup” and how I could use a lot of practice. I sit on the carpeted floor. I think about how dumb it is to have carpet in a garage, carpet that gets run over and over by my parents’ and brother’s cars every day. Hank leaves, and my mom walks over to me.
“Get off the floor,” she says.
“It’s carpet.”
“It’s dirty.”
“Then why do we have it?”
“Why couldn’t you finish the lesson? Do you know how expensive it was?”
“I got scared. And I didn’t ask for lessons to begin with.”
“You need them. What’s going to happen when you’re out on the real road and you get scared?”
“I don’t get why you can’t just teach me.”
“Because we fight all the time,” she says, moving toward the door.
“No, we don’t!”
“Just come inside. You need to start your homework.”
“No. I need to talk to you.”
She stands by the door and crosses her arms and waits.
“I don’t want driving lessons. I don’t want to meet with Hank again. I don’t like him.”
“You don’t have to like him. He’s just teaching you how to drive. You don’t have a choice, unless you don’t plan on getting your license. Now get up and go inside. I need to make dinner.”
“Oh, you need to make dinner. What? You’re going to heat up some meat sauce out of a jar and overcook the pasta? I don’t want your dinner.”
“Okay, then you don’t need to eat.”
“Why do you want me to be unhappy?”
“I don’t. Why do you think I’m such a terrible mother?”
“I didn’t say that!”
My mom starts crying, and I want to get up and hug her, but I don’t. She’s standing in the doorway to the house, and I’m still sitting on the floor. I pick at the rubber on the bottom of my sneakers. A piece tears off, and I ball it up in my hand until it disappears.
“Everything I do is wrong,” she says after a while.
“No. Everything I do is wrong.”
“I’m sorry you don’t like my cooking.”
“I’m sorry I said that. I just want you to help me with stuff.”
“I help you with everything! I got you driving lessons, I help you with your papers, I make sure Brad helps you with math….”
“No, like, my life.”
“I ask you all the time about what’s going on and y
ou never tell me, or you lie, so I just stopped asking. I can only take so much.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you feel bad. I just feel like you’ll judge me if I tell you stuff.”
“I’m your mother.” My mom sits down on the floor next to me. “I would never judge you.”
“Yeah, you would.”
“I guarantee you, whatever you tell me, I’ve done worse. I used to be a nurse, you know. I’ve seen it all. I wanted to ask about Jensen, but I didn’t want to pry.”
“I don’t know what her deal is. She’s distanced herself from everyone.”
“Do you think she’s upset because you’ve all hit puberty and she hasn’t?”
“Mom, gross! What are you even talking about? She has her period, too, like everyone else.”
“Getting your period doesn’t mean you’re just grown up all of a sudden. Growing up is about maturity, too. And that takes a long time to develop. Jensen doesn’t seem as interested in boys as you are, as your friends are.”
“But do you think that’s bad?”
“To be interested in boys? No. It’s natural. Just don’t be too fast with them. There’s no rush. I don’t care if you kiss a boy once in a while, but I don’t think you’re ready for sexual intercourse yet.”
“ ‘Intercourse’?”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve had intercourse.”
“No. I haven’t. But no one calls it that.”
“Good. Please don’t be fast with boys.”
“ ‘Fast’?”
“Moving fast—like, sexually.” I see her pause. “Did you…move too fast with Stephen?” she asks. “Is that what happened between you two? You can tell me.”
“No!” I say, even though it might be true. Maybe we did too much too soon and it scared him away, or maybe he got what he wanted and got bored. But he really did move, and for whatever reason that distance was too far for him to travel to me and make things work. “He moved to Wellington and switched schools.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s a shame. He was a nice young gentleman.”
That’s up for debate, but Mom presses on. “Maybe Jensen is just upset because she hasn’t gotten those feelings yet,” she says.
“I guess.”
“She will, though, soon enough.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re at that age when these things happen.”
“That’s what Tomassi said.”
“Tomassi is a smart girl. I like her.”
“Yeah, she gives good advice.”
“I can give you advice, too, you know. I’m your mother.”
It would be years before I could have a normal, healthy conversation with my mom. I don’t know when other girls learned how to do that, but for so long I couldn’t. I think my mom always wanted to be my best friend, and when she saw me attach myself to Jensen and then boys and then men, she felt me pull away from her, not need her anymore. But the truth is that I will always need her.
For years, I would wish that I could call and tell her how I was feeling: that I didn’t even know who I was in the garage that day, because my mind was all over the place. I would have so many therapists later on who told me about “boundaries,” that I needed to speak up about what made me uncomfortable and learn to leave people, places, and things that weren’t healthy for me. Of course, I didn’t put this into practice right away, but slowly I became better at communicating how I felt. I started to treasure phone calls with my mom instead of dread them. When she visits me, we often go to museums. She loves to walk through the exhibits and look at the art, see the view, and stand with me. I hold her hand; I speak to her with lightness and ease where there was once heaviness and fear. I’m finally able to tell her I appreciate her after all this time.
“It’s hard for me to talk sometimes,” I tell her, my face covered in snot, as we sit on the floor of the garage. I take a deep breath and wipe my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “I just come off like a bitch.”
“It hurts my feelings when you say those mean comments. I know I don’t work full-time anymore, but being a mom is a full-time job. Someday, when you have kids, you’ll understand. I worry about you all the time, and I just want you to be happy. You can always come to me and talk to me about anything.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too. You’ll always be my baby.”
I lean over and hug her, and she starts to cry into my hair. It’s usually intolerable to see her cry, but now I sink into her even more, and we let each other sob.
Eventually we separate and stand up to go inside. My mom shuts the door behind us, and I head upstairs to wash my face. I stare at myself in the mirror. My eyes get really green when I cry, just like my mom’s.
• TWENTY •
In May, my brother receives a full scholarship for the premed program at the University of Miami. He’s basically set for life. My dad flies home early to celebrate, and even though it’s a school night, we decide to go out for dinner. I rush upstairs and take a quick shower, throw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and meet my family in the car.
We drive to Maggiano’s. It’s a huge Italian restaurant that’s supposed to resemble a house with lots of rooms and lots of people. My mother has summoned my aunt, my uncle, two cousins, one cousin’s long-term girlfriend, the other cousin’s husband and their daughter, the long-term girlfriend’s mom (who is a pastry chef from Hungary), and the mom’s boyfriend (who lives in Puerto Rico but happens to be here now for some reason). My brother hasn’t technically graduated from high school yet, but lots of kids seem to be celebrating graduation early. We’re seated next to another party: a girl with platinum-blond hair, chemically straightened (I can tell), celebrating her graduation from Boca Prep, one of our rival schools. Their party is somehow bigger than ours, and it almost feels like we’re competing.
The Boca Prep family has lots of children with them, little kids that they’re letting run around in circles, dragging metallic helium balloons, in the shape of stars and graduation caps, by their weighted sandbags. One of the balloons, a royal-blue star, hits our table, and my dad elbows it away. The group of kids waits in front of him, ready for punishment, ready for scolding, and I don’t blame them. They’ve crossed a line, entering the realm of parents, who may choose to yell instead of ignore.
“Hey, kids,” my dad says. “Go play in traffic.” They scatter.
“Mom,” I whisper, and pat her leg. “Do you want to, like, say something?”
“Maybe we should move?” she suggests.
“No!” Brad yells. “This is fine. Let’s just order. I’m starving.”
The waiter takes all of our orders, going around the table slowly, painfully. Brad calms down once the breadbasket arrives. He eats six pieces of bread with a lot of butter. I have two pieces and a spoonful of my mom’s pasta e fagioli soup. I try my dad’s Italian wedding soup, too, and I like his a lot better. He offers me the rest, but I say no. He gets mad when I eat more mozzarella than tomatoes from the caprese appetizer.
“Finish your tomato,” he says, eating the last of his.
I excuse myself to use the restroom. In the bathroom, the graduation girl reapplies her lip gloss, and another girl, a friend, plays with her hair, fixes it, even though it doesn’t need fixing.
“What are you staring at?” Graduation Girl asks me; I’m just standing by the bathroom door, motionless.
“I need to use the bathroom.”
“It’s a free country,” she says with a laugh, and proceeds to ignore me.
I think about Amber and how she’d probably stand up for me if she was here. At least I have a friend, somewhere out there.
Back at the table, we eat fast and get full quick; we need to take most of our meal home. The pastas and heavy sauces make me tired, but I manage t
o have another piece of bread and butter, which my dad scolds me for. My brother hasn’t said a word all night and keeps falling asleep. When the cake comes, his head is on the table and he won’t wake up. My food coma usually ensues mid–drive home, as I delicately slumber away in the back seat, but this is a new one for Brad. He must have had too much shrimp fra diavolo.
My parents begin whisper-yelling to each other, with my uncle getting involved at one point, then backing off. I don’t realize how serious it is until my cousin Liza, the nurse, starts taking Brad’s pulse. She lifts his head and his eyes are blank. I get scared for a second that he’s dead. I hold my hands together under my napkin and pray that he survives whatever this is. My dad carries him to the car, and the bill is taken care of. My aunt shakes her head and rubs my back as we follow them, and I feel lost, like I’m left out of the loop of what’s going on here.
When we get home, my mom puts my brother to bed and comes into my room. She says something about pills, painkillers, taking too many. She says he must have gotten them from a friend at school. I wonder if he got them from Matty, but probably not, since he and Matty never got along. I think of Leigh and the night I saw her passed out from pills, but at least she was at home. My brother was in public. We were at a freaking Maggiano’s.
It reminds me of when I was little and Brad used to get these horrible headaches, migraines, and I didn’t know whether he was going to survive. I held conferences with my stuffed animals over whether or not I should venture to his room to check on him. Sometimes I thought it’d be best to knock on the wall connected to my parents’ room and ask my mom what was going on, but other times I crawled on all fours to his room and made sure he was breathing, sleeping on his side in his blue blanket in the night.
Tonight, though, my mom begs me not to go in there. “He just needs to sleep it off,” she reassures. “He’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Is he in trouble?” I ask, not wanting him to be, but curious.
“Yes, but it doesn’t concern you. Just get some rest.”
I go to sleep, and when I wake up, it’s after 11:00 a.m. and it’s clear that Brad isn’t fine, that he is in trouble, and that I’m missing school.
The Brittanys Page 19