Family Pictures (12 page)

“You should call Olivia’s mom, Mrs. Adamson, and talk to her,” Claudia offers quickly. “She’s really nice and she’s planning stuff for the out-of-towners.”

Angie frowns at her daughter. “How many out-of-towners are there? I thought this was a small party in the apartment.”

“It is! But four girls from camp are going, and some of us aren’t from New York, so her mom’s taking us to see
Wicked
on Sunday.”

Sylvie looks at Eve. “You wouldn’t feel out of place with all these kids you don’t know?”

“I do know them, Mom,” says Eve. “We’re on iChat and Facebook all the time. They’ve become really good friends of mine.”

“Let me think about it,” Sylvie begs for time. “I’ll get the details from Angie and I’ll think about it. I also have to talk to your father about it.”

“No, Mom!” Eve commands softly. “You can’t. You know he’ll say no, that New York’s too dangerous. Please don’t tell him. You can’t.”

Angie is surprised. “Mark thinks New York is dangerous? I thought he spends most of his work there.”

“That’s the point,” Sylvie sighs. “He says he knows what it’s really like. That’s why he won’t let Eve even consider NYU or Columbia.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Angie says. “Mark knows better than that.”

“I know. It’s this thing he has.” Sylvie shrugs. “Completely irrational, but he would not be happy about Eve flying to New York.”

“First of all, he’s not my dad,” Eve interjects, something she rarely says, rarely thinks about, uses only when Mark is saying no to something she really wants to do. Mark is the only father she has ever known, and certainly someone always referred to as “Papa,” other than when he is putting his foot down.

“He’s my stepdad. I love him, Mom, but even you know how he can be completely irrational some of the time.”

“Like the Facebook fear,” Angie points out.

“And it isn’t his decision to make.” Eve is fortified by Angie’s agreement. “I’m your daughter, therefore you’re the only person who gets to decide what I can and cannot do.”

Sylvie sighs. “What about when I say no, you can’t buy that leather jacket, then you get Mark to buy it for you? Who gets to decide then? Then it’s fine for Mark to step in and overrule me with his decision. It doesn’t cut both ways, you know.”

“That’s different,” Eve says. “That’s a teenage girl exercising her daddy–daughter rights.”

“Oh, he’s back to being Daddy now?”

“Depends. Mom, even you have to agree he can be irrational.”

“Eve, I can’t hide this from him, and if he does say no, I can’t overrule that. It’s too huge. We’re a team, a partnership. I can’t go behind his back.”

“I disagree,” Angie interjects, immediately apologizing as Sylvie glares at her. “I’m sorry, but I do. It
is
your decision. If Mark had a rational explanation, that would be something else entirely, but he doesn’t, so in this case you do have the right to overrule him.”

“Exactly!” Eve smiles. “You don’t have to ask him. He’s not even here. Didn’t you say he’s away until next Wednesday? He doesn’t even have to know.”

*   *   *

Sylvie is in a quandary. Having been brought up on such shaky ground, with so many secrets, the single most important requirement she has always had in relationships is honesty.

She has never lied, withheld, kept secrets. Until her mother sowed a seed of doubt in her mind, she has always trusted Mark implicitly. Yet she cannot deny Eve has a point. Mark does have these irrational views, a steely refusal even to discuss something he believes absolutely with nothing to back it up.

So she understands Eve’s frustration, a frustration she sometimes shares. While she frequently talks about honesty being the foundation of trust, if she is absolutely truthful, hasn’t she sometimes avoided revealing the whole truth?

Sylvie has known about Eve’s secret Facebook account for years, but hasn’t ever discussed it overtly with her.

Eve often leaves her laptop open, her Facebook home page proudly displayed. Sylvie would have to have been blind not to see it, Eve stupid not to realize, but both were complicit in their unspoken agreement to ignore it.

As long as Sylvie’s feigned ignorance remains unspoken, Mark need not know. She is bemused by these seemingly random bans; finds it tiring and ridiculous; recognizes her daughter, always popular, will suffer by being banned from this Web site that has become so essential in the lives of these teenagers.

But New York? How could she hide something so big from him? What would that say about their relationship? What, more important, would it
do
to their relationship? And was she prepared to find out?

17

Eve

Eve walks up the stairs, anxiety and hope mixing together in her stomach, praying her mother will find a way to say yes, to let her go to the one place she’s always wanted to visit, the one place she has never been allowed to go.

Even now she holds out hope she’ll be able to go to NYU. She knows it’s the place for her, sees herself striding through the streets of Manhattan, mixing with New York intellectuals, the likes of which she knows she won’t find at USC.

She lies in bed fantasizing about her future life, refusing to acknowledge the fears that accompany those fantasies: being away from home, from all she knows, all that is safe.

Her mother has always been her one safe place. New York is something she feels she has to do, something she has to accomplish, the place she is supposed to be, and yet even thinking about leaving her mother makes her feel unmoored, alone, vulnerable.

What a welcome distraction it has been, to focus on food rather than on her anxiety. The more she thinks about food—what she’s eaten, what she will eat, what she won’t eat, what calories she has ingested—the less time there is to think about her vulnerability, her pain, and the better she feels.

Almost … high. Or numb. She isn’t sure which, but it is infinitely preferable to feeling like a scared little girl, to feeling like her world is about to change, and not having any control over it, a feeling she knows she has had before, even though she can’t remember the details of her father’s death.

“Are you okay?” Claudia turns to her as they throw themselves down on the bed, the laptop in front of them, Claudia already tapping on the keyboard.

“I’m good.” Eve nods. “Just nervous. Hopeful. Keeping everything crossed.”

A pretty blond girl appears, waves at them both with a big smile, Claudia’s friend Grace.

“I know who you are,” she says to Eve. “I’ve seen millions of pictures of you on Claudia’s Facebook.”

“I’m trying to get Eve to come this weekend,” Claudia explains. “We’re working on her mom right now.”

“Why would your mom not want you to come? What’s the big deal?” Grace asks.

“It’s not my mom,” Eve explains. “It’s my dad. He thinks New York is filled with rapists and murderers and no one gets out of there alive. And this, by the way, is despite the fact that he works there half the time.”

“That’s totally freaky,” she says. “But I get it. My dad has this thing about California. He’s convinced that the whole state’s going to fall into a fault line and disappear in some ginormous earthquake or tsunami or something. He was there during an earthquake once, and he said it was terrifying and he won’t risk his family, even though he’s also been there a ton. But if your parents are freaked out about New York, you could always stay with me in Connecticut. I’m about forty-five minutes outside of New York. Maybe he’d be okay with Connecticut.”

Eve shrugs. “I think our safest bet is for him to know nothing.”

“I so hope you come out here. By the way, my brother Chris saw some of your Facebook pictures, and he thinks you’re totally hot.”

Claudia nudges Eve. “I hate you!” she teases. “Her brother’s so hot!”

Eve blushes. “Really?”

“Really. He’d definitely be happy if you came and stayed out in Connecticut. He’s going to be around later, if you want to iChat with him.…” She winks.

Eve laughs before groaning. “If my mom says no to this weekend, I think I might kill myself.”

“She’s not going to say no,” Claudia says firmly. “
My
mom won’t let her.”

*   *   *

Downstairs, Angie looks at Sylvie. “So. What are you thinking?”

Sylvie sighs deeply. “I can’t not tell Mark. I just couldn’t be that dishonest.”

“What if you asked forgiveness rather than permission?” Angie says. “We have more damned air miles than I know what to do with, so I’ll book the flight with miles.”

“I can’t take your money.” Sylvie, aghast, shakes her head.

“First of all, you’re not taking money. It’s air miles. Second of all, you’re my best friend, so yes, you can. Sylvie, there is no reason why Eve shouldn’t go. She and Claudia are the most sensible girls in the grade, and they’re best friends. Very soon, the pair of them are going to be leaving, then that’s it. You want her coming back, and you want her memories of home to be good. We all know this is one of Mark’s crazy things, and as long as you tell him when she’s en route, there’s nothing he can do. So he might get angry. So what? He’ll get over it.”

“I know you’re right.” Sylvie sighs again. “It just feels … deceitful.”

“Sylvie!” Angie berates, growing exasperated. “It isn’t deceitful. It’s fine. They need to go off and learn what it is to be a little bit independent, for God’s sake. We’ve got girls who have no idea how to raise a little hell. The least we can do is send them away and pray someone forces drugs on them.”

“Angie!” Sylvie admonishes, but she’s laughing.

“You know I’m right, don’t you?”

“No. But I think you might have persuaded me to pretend.” Sylvie smiles, instantly feeling better. “I’ll call Mark and ask him. If I can reach him, fine. If I can’t, then I’ll make the decision on my own.”

“Good girl,” Angie says, Sylvie instantly feeling better.

*   *   *

Angie is the kind of woman other women ought to hate. At first glance, they are inevitably threatened by her looks, her body, her height, but as soon as they meet her, they are enveloped in her warm exuberance, her boisterous humor, her loyalty and kindness.

She is a study in contrasts, the reason, Simon always says, for the success of their marriage.

“She’s like Sybil,” he’ll sigh, rolling his eyes but casting an affectionate glance at his wife. “You never know which Angie you’re going to get.”

Sylvie is fascinated by Angie’s self-confidence, her comfort in her skin, her ability to set boundaries. At parties Angie is the life and soul, but should anyone make the mistake of overstepping the mark, or flirting just a touch too dangerously with the tall gorgeous redhead, she will politely and firmly shut them down.

She doesn’t need to undergo an attempt at a pickup in order to feel beautiful. She doesn’t need a stranger to tell her she’s gorgeous in order to feel validated. She has been told those things all her life. It means nothing.

What matters to Angie is her family. Her friends. Loyalty. Trust. Having fun, and knowing when to draw the line. It is precisely the reason why Sylvie loves her so much.

18

Eve

Eve and Claudia, shuffling through JFK, giggling with the excitement of their prospective weekend, falter only when they step into the arrivals hall.

Members of the multicolored melting pot—hordes of people chattering in every language imaginable—lean over the barriers, in places five deep, waving and shrieking as they spy their long-lost relatives. Glum-looking drivers stand dispiritedly, holding boards or white pieces of paper on which are scribbled names, halfheartedly attempting to make a connection with every newly arrived passenger.

“Oh shit.” Claudia grinds to a halt, the smile sliding off her face. “How are we supposed to find her in all these people? She’s not answering her texts. Let’s walk out and see if we can find her.”

Eve’s excitement is replaced with a familiar anxiety. This isn’t what was supposed to happen. Of late, she hasn’t been good at dealing with change, particularly last-minute change. She likes things to be planned, likes to know what is expected, and any untoward circumstances bring up a sense of panic that can be hard to control.

“Are you okay?” Claudia looks at her friend, noting that something appears to be wrong. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m okay,” Eve lies, although she’s not.

“Eve? This is going to be fine.”

Eve hears Claudia’s reassurance, but she can’t be reassured, not once she has set off down this path.

She loves Claudia; Claudia is her best friend in the world, but Claudia doesn’t understand anymore what it’s like to be Eve. How could Claudia understand when she has never lost anyone close to her, when she doesn’t have to worry about her weight, even though she says she does, when her life runs so smoothly, even though she thinks it doesn’t.

Eve can feel them drifting apart, and she wants things to be as they were, but they can’t be when there are so many secrets Claudia doesn’t know: the lies about food, the secret eating, and now the shame of purging, the mixed shame and relief, the numbness that comes with getting rid of everything inside.

“I just need to go to the bathroom,” Eve says as Claudia frowns. “My stomach’s still a bit upset. I’ll be right back. You call and find out what’s going on.”

She turns to go, rustling in her handbag once she is out of sight, dropping the empty laxative packet into the first empty trash can she passes.

*   *   *

“Oh my God!” Olivia’s voice comes ringing down the phone. “I can’t believe you’re here! When did you get in?”

“About an hour ago,” Claudia says. “We can’t find your mom. Can you text her and tell her we’re here? I’m really worried she left already.”

There is a sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry. My mom had a last-minute meeting. I thought she was telling your mom you should get a cab.”

“Er, no.” Claudia attempts a laugh. “As far as I know, she just told my mom she’d be picking us up from the airport. What do we do now?”

“Just jump in a cab and come over. You know the address, right? It’s on Park, but they’re renovating the lobby, so come to the side on Sixty-ninth. I’m so excited! I can’t believe you’re here! We’re going to have so much fun, and guess what?”