blame.
“I am holding in my hands a fucking box of oatmeal!” my mother screamed. They had long ago given up many things; appropriate language in the home was among the first to go.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” my father muttered, still angry but also, all of a sudden, deflated and pouty.
That’s what it was like, I told Jane. Anything—a phone call, a birthday party, oatmeal—could turn into hatred between them and then, without warning, into defeat so palpable it made your heart stop. Until they finally ended it, their marriage was another planet, a harsh, extraterrestrial climate—scalding mornings followed by blue-black evenings so frigid no life could possibly be sustained there.
Jane crunched on another handful of pistachios. “Huh,” she said. Sometimes, in those early days, we didn’t know what to say when one of our experiences so obviously didn’t match the other’s. Later, with relief, we would figure out that it was okay to say nothing. “That’s a bummer,” she said; through her mouthful of nuts it sounded like There’s my thumb, or … “My parents are not like that,” she added, stating the obvious, because although I hadn’t met them yet, I knew that the Westons were, if nothing else, still together. “They’re boring.” She looked at me as if for permission to go on with her story of lesser angst. “They’re boring and utterly predictable except that they never mastered the art of parental alignment. So whenever I wanted something, some toy or sugary treat or something, and one of them said no, I could go to the other and that one would probably say yes.” Her eyes widened at the insanity of it.
“So then what?” I asked. I was holding a pistachio shell. I tucked it into my curls, like a barrette.
“Then what what?”
“If one of them said yes, did you always get what you wanted?” I imagined Jane a spoiled princess in a pink-carpeted room, ruler of the kingdom of whatever-the-hell-she-wanted.
She looked at the blue bowl of nuts, mostly empty, and at the second bowl into which we had been depositing the shells. With a little shudder, she pushed both of them away. “No!” she said, indignant. She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “But actually, pretty often.”
I pointed to the pistachio shell in my hair, secured there by the spirally strands, and then I fluffed my hair showily, like a movie star, a slightly mentally ill movie star.
“Very gorgeous,” Jane said, and she plucked a shell from the bowl and wriggled it into her own curls, and then we were the same again, two girls with pistachio-shell barrettes suspended in our curly hair.
Chapter Eleven
Even in your closest friendships, you’re alone. Maybe it’s your best friend who, in fact, reminds you, just by making it her business to try to know your heart, that no one can—that our fate is to suffer in isolation and then die. But it’s our collective fate! So I guess I’m an optimist.
There are plenty of things I don’t tell Jane, bits of information I edit out, stories I don’t share—so that the picture she has of me is incomplete, a self-portrait I present to her, and if she sees light where there should be shadow, well, she can choose to be dazzled, or she can fill in the darkness herself.
When Seth was a senior in high school, Stan decided that we would take a family road trip to Philadelphia. Seth had just been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, along with a slew of other top-tier colleges my parents couldn’t afford. “The Ivy League,” my dad kept saying, the week Seth got the fat envelope from Penn and then, after that, the one from Dartmouth. “I’ll be damned.” He would say that and scowl and rub his fingers hard across his eyebrows, as if trying to pay for an expensive private college really would consign my father to hell.
This was months after he had canceled our trip to Europe, and we were suspicious and raw. Fran took to referring to our impending journey with a
“I am holding in my hands a fucking box of oatmeal!” my mother screamed. They had long ago given up many things; appropriate language in the home was among the first to go.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” my father muttered, still angry but also, all of a sudden, deflated and pouty.
That’s what it was like, I told Jane. Anything—a phone call, a birthday party, oatmeal—could turn into hatred between them and then, without warning, into defeat so palpable it made your heart stop. Until they finally ended it, their marriage was another planet, a harsh, extraterrestrial climate—scalding mornings followed by blue-black evenings so frigid no life could possibly be sustained there.
Jane crunched on another handful of pistachios. “Huh,” she said. Sometimes, in those early days, we didn’t know what to say when one of our experiences so obviously didn’t match the other’s. Later, with relief, we would figure out that it was okay to say nothing. “That’s a bummer,” she said; through her mouthful of nuts it sounded like There’s my thumb, or … “My parents are not like that,” she added, stating the obvious, because although I hadn’t met them yet, I knew that the Westons were, if nothing else, still together. “They’re boring.” She looked at me as if for permission to go on with her story of lesser angst. “They’re boring and utterly predictable except that they never mastered the art of parental alignment. So whenever I wanted something, some toy or sugary treat or something, and one of them said no, I could go to the other and that one would probably say yes.” Her eyes widened at the insanity of it.
“So then what?” I asked. I was holding a pistachio shell. I tucked it into my curls, like a barrette.
“Then what what?”
“If one of them said yes, did you always get what you wanted?” I imagined Jane a spoiled princess in a pink-carpeted room, ruler of the kingdom of whatever-the-hell-she-wanted.
She looked at the blue bowl of nuts, mostly empty, and at the second bowl into which we had been depositing the shells. With a little shudder, she pushed both of them away. “No!” she said, indignant. She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “But actually, pretty often.”
I pointed to the pistachio shell in my hair, secured there by the spirally strands, and then I fluffed my hair showily, like a movie star, a slightly mentally ill movie star.
“Very gorgeous,” Jane said, and she plucked a shell from the bowl and wriggled it into her own curls, and then we were the same again, two girls with pistachio-shell barrettes suspended in our curly hair.
Chapter Eleven
Even in your closest friendships, you’re alone. Maybe it’s your best friend who, in fact, reminds you, just by making it her business to try to know your heart, that no one can—that our fate is to suffer in isolation and then die. But it’s our collective fate! So I guess I’m an optimist.
There are plenty of things I don’t tell Jane, bits of information I edit out, stories I don’t share—so that the picture she has of me is incomplete, a self-portrait I present to her, and if she sees light where there should be shadow, well, she can choose to be dazzled, or she can fill in the darkness herself.
When Seth was a senior in high school, Stan decided that we would take a family road trip to Philadelphia. Seth had just been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, along with a slew of other top-tier colleges my parents couldn’t afford. “The Ivy League,” my dad kept saying, the week Seth got the fat envelope from Penn and then, after that, the one from Dartmouth. “I’ll be damned.” He would say that and scowl and rub his fingers hard across his eyebrows, as if trying to pay for an expensive private college really would consign my father to hell.
This was months after he had canceled our trip to Europe, and we were suspicious and raw. Fran took to referring to our impending journey with a
Similar Books
