Now Chris lifted the shirt off the table and held it up, shaking it slightly as the typewriter bell clanged again from the other room. “What do you think?”
“Looks okay,” I said. “You missed a big crease on the right sleeve, though.”
He glanced down at it, then sighed. “This is so freaking hard,” he said, putting it back on the table. “I don’t see why people bother.”
“I don’t see why you bother,” I said. “Since when do you need to be wrinkle free, anyway? You used to consider wearing pants dressing up.”
“Cute,” he said, making a face at me. “You wouldn’t understand, anyway.”
“Yeah, right. Excuse me, Eggbert, I keep forgetting you’re the smart one.”
He straightened the shirt, not looking at me. “What I mean,” he said slowly, “is that you’d just have to know what it’s like to want to do something nice for somebody else. Out of consideration. Out of love. ”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
“Exactly.” He picked up the shirt again. The wrinkle was still there, not that I was going to point it out now. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Compassion. Relationships. Two things you are sadly, and sorely, lacking.”
“I am the queen of relationships,” I said indignantly. “And hello, I just spent the entire morning planning our mother’s wedding. That is so freaking compassionate of me.”
“You,” he said, folding the shirt neatly over one arm, waiter-style, “have yet to experience any kind of serious commitment-”
“What?”
“-and you have bitched and moaned so much about the wedding I’d hardly call that compassionate.”
I just stood there, staring at him. There was no reasoning with him lately. It was like he’d been brainwashed by some religious cult. “Who are you?” I asked him.
“All I’m saying,” he replied, quietly, “is that I’m really happy. And I wish you could be happy too. Like this.”
“I am happy,” I snapped, and I meant it, although it sounded bitter just because I was so pissed off. “I am,” I repeated, in a more level voice.
He reached over and patted my shoulder, as if he knew better. “I’ll see you later,” he said, turning and heading up the kitchen stairs to his room. I watched him go, carrying his still-wrinkled shirt, and realized I was clenching my teeth, something I found myself doing too often lately.
Bing! went the typewriter bell from the other room, and my mother started another line. Melanie and Brock Dobbin were probably halfway to heartbreak already, by the sound of it. My mother’s novels were the gasping romantic type, spreading across several exotic locales and peopled with characters that had everything and yet nothing. Riches yet poverty of the heart. And so on.
I walked over to the entrance of the sunroom, careful to be quiet, and looked in at her. When she wrote she seemed to be in another world, oblivious of us: even when we were little and screaming and squawking, she’d just lift her hand from where she was sitting, her back to us, the keys still clacking, and say, “Shhhhhhh.” As if that was enough to shut us up, making us see into whatever world she was in at that moment, at the Plaza Hotel or some beach in Capri, where an exquisitely dressed woman was pining for a man she was sure she had lost forever.
When Chris and I were in elementary school, my mom was pretty broke. She hadn’t published anything yet except newspaper stuff, and even that had petered out once the bands she was writing about-like my dad’s, all 1970s stuff, what they call “classic rock” now-began to die out or drop off the radio. She got a job teaching writing at the local community college, which paid practically nothing, and we lived in a series of nasty apartment complexes, all with names like Ridgewood Pines and Lakeview Forest, which had no lakes or pines or forests anywhere to be seen. Back then, she wrote at the kitchen table, usually during the evenings or late at night, and some afternoons. Even then, her stories were exotic; she always picked up the free brochures from the local travel agency and fished Gourmet magazine out of the stacks at the recycling center to use as research. While my brother was named after my mother’s favorite saint, my name was inspired by an expensive brand of cognac she’d seen advertised in Harper’s Bazaar. Never mind that we were living on Kraft macaroni and cheese while her characters favored Cristal and caviar, lounging in Dior pantsuits while we shopped at the thrift store. She always loved glamour, my mother, even if she’d never seen it up close.
Chris and I constantly interrupted her while she was working, which drove her crazy. Finally, at a flea market, she found one of those gypsy curtains, the kind that are made up of long strings of beads, and attached it above the entryway to the kitchen. It became our understood symboclass="underline" if the curtain was pulled aside, out of the way, the kitchen was fair game. But if it was hanging there, my mother was working, and we had to find our snacks and entertainment elsewhere.
I was about six then, and I loved to stand there and brush my fingertips over the beads, watching them swish back and forth. They made the softest sound, like little bells. I could peer through them and still see my mother, but now she looked almost exotic, like a fortune-teller or a fairy, a maker of magic. Which was what she was, but I didn’t know it then.
Most of the remnants of our apartment years had been long lost or given away, but the beaded curtain had made the trip to the Big New House, as we’d called it when we moved in. It was one of the first things my mother hung up, before even our school pictures or her favorite Picasso print in the living room. There was a nail so it could be pulled back out of sight, but now it was down, a little worse for wear, but still doing the job. I leaned closer, peering in at my mother. She was still hard at work, fingers flying, and I closed my eyes and listened. It was like music I’d heard all my life, even more than “This Lullaby.” All those keystrokes, all those letters, so many words. I brushed my fingers over the beads and watched as her image rippled, like it was on water, breaking apart gently and shimmering before becoming whole again.
Chapter Two
It was time to dump Jonathan.
“Tell me again why you’re doing this?” Lissa asked me. She was sitting on my bed, flipping through my CDs and smoking a cigarette, which was fast stinking up my room even though she’d sworn it wouldn’t, since she had it halfway out the window. Even before I quit I’d hated the stink of smoking, but with Lissa I always let things slide more than I should have. I think everyone has at least one friend like that. “I mean, I like Jonathan.”
“You like everybody,” I told her, leaning closer to the mirror and examining my lip liner.
“That’s not true,” she said, picking up a CD and turning it over to examine the back. “I never liked Mr. Mitchell. He always looked at my boobs when I went up to do theorems on the board. He looked at everybody’s boobs.”
“Lissa,” I said, “high school is over. And besides, teachers don’t count.”
“I’m just saying,” she said.
“The thing is,” I went on as I lined my lips, turning the pencil slowly, “that it’s summer now, and I’m leaving for school in September. And Jonathan… I don’t know. He’s just not a keeper. He’s not worth working my schedule around if we’re only going to break up in a few weeks anyway.”
“But you might not break up.”
I leaned back, admiring my handiwork, and smudged a bit along my top lip, evening it out. “We’ll break up,” I said. “I’m not going to Stanford with any other entanglements than absolutely necessary.”
She bit her lip, then tucked a springy curl behind one ear, ducking her head with the hurt expression she always got lately when we talked about the end of the summer. Lissa’s safe zone was the eight weeks left before we all split for different directions, and she hated to think past that. “Well, of course not,” she said quietly. “I mean, why would you?”