Getting Over Jack Wagner (27 page)

“What is it? Is something wrong?”

“No, no, nothing's wrong. But I'd rather talk in person.” I heard her draw in a long breath, then exhale it. (Since when did my mother exhale? Ever?) “Can you come over for dinner?”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Why? Is Camilla coming?”

“No.”

“What about Harv?”

“He's working late. It'll be just the two of us.”

Was the woman nuts? I think the last time we'd done anything “just the two of us,” I was fifteen and she was taking me to Dr. Greenblatt's for a tetanus shot.

“I'm in the city now,” Mom said, “but I should be home by four—”

This was the final straw. My mother never came into the city. Downtown Philly made her anxious. The crowds. The noise. The public bathrooms. The sausage-and-egg sandwiches sold on street corners. Whenever she and Harv stopped by my apartment—because they “happened to be in the neighborhood”—she brought her own hand sanitizer and checked that all my doors and windows were tightly locked.

“I could have dinner ready by six,” Mom was saying. “Can you come right after work?”

On the inside, I was coming up with all kinds of clever, witty excuses, but somehow “Yeah, I guess” tripped out of my mouth. “Six,” I repeated, and before Mom could shock me with something else, dropped the phone back in its cradle.

The red light on line two went dark. For minutes, I stared at the silent phone pad, willing it to get up and explain itself. When I felt Maggie looking at me, I forced my gaze to the computer. I mustered the illusion of doing work by repeatedly, neurotically tapping the letter “a” while running through every possible explanation for my mother's invitation:

• a) she was getting divorced (not likely)
  
• b) she was having an affair (less likely)
  
• c) she was having a baby (gross me out)
  
• d) she was disowning me once and for all and wanted to be on her own turf, eating homemade meat in meat sauce, while she did it.
  

Although “d” had a certain charm, none of them seemed right. For the next two hours, I worried my way through a blur of ski resort jargon (i.e., “cozy,” “exhilarating,” and the unfortunately necessary “winter wonderland”) but by noon, had no better idea what my mother was planning. All I had was a more palpable feeling of dread.

As I was tapping “h” and considering cake, I felt a hand drop on my left shoulder. “Are you okay?” Maggie asked.

“Me?” I stopped tapping. “Fine. Why?”

“We heard you got a phone call before.”

So I wasn't the only one shocked when I got phone calls. “It wasn't Donny, if that's what you're wondering.”

“That's not what we're wondering.”

At the “we,” my glance skittered around the office. “Oh.”

“Everything okay?” she asked again.

“Everything's fine.”

Maggie just kept standing there until I heard a familiar pop and fizz behind my left ear. I saw a pink-nailed hand reach across my screen and set a can of Diet Coke on my mouse pad. “You look like you could use one,” Maggie said.

*  *  *

I managed to find an empty seat on the 5:24 Glendale Local. This in itself was no small feat. Even more impressive was the fact that I looked scary enough to prevent anyone from sitting beside me. Under normal circumstances, this would have given me immense satisfaction. I'd logged hours of public transportation perfecting my “don't even think about it” look when strangers hesitated near me in the aisle. But today, strangers were wise to stay out of my way. I felt increasingly unstable as the train hurtled toward my mother and my meaty dinner and the news I'd finally deduced must be waiting for me when I got there:

Lou was back.

This theory was unconfirmed, of course, but it would explain everything. It would explain why Mom had been in the city (obviously Lou wouldn't come to the suburbs, but would meet her in a swank jazz club or trendy coffee bar). It would explain why she sounded so calm on the phone (shock, thinly disguised as serenity). It would explain why she called me “honey” (to delude Lou into thinking we had a healthy relationship and she'd done a good job parenting on her own for the last fifteen years).

I gnawed my cuticles off one by one as the train barreled on toward Glendale, seeming much faster and more single-minded than ever before. Outside the window, the city became less gritty and more charming the farther we got from downtown. Buildings shortened, streets widened. Trees sprang from the asphalt. At the train stations, brick walls smothered with bleeding spray paint gradually morphed into cute little coffee shops with names like “The Choo Choo Café.”

“Glendale next,” the conductor announced, poking his head inside our car. “Glendale, next and final stop,” he added, which sounded ominous and probably symbolic of something I couldn't afford to contemplate.

The other remaining passengers started standing and crowding into the aisle, fishing in their briefcases and leather shoulder bags. Most of them were classic urban professionals: the kind of men who read the business section on elevators, the kind of women who wore Keds with skirts in the '80s.

“Tyler! It's Mommy!” one woman yelled into a cell phone the width of a slice of cheese. Usually, I had a mental field day with people like her; invariably they talked much too loudly, spoke about nothing that couldn't wait five minutes, and had at least one child named Tyler. “Did the maid come? Did Daddy call? I'll be there soon, sweetie. Take the manicotti out of the freezer. Then sit still and watch TV.”

As she hung up, preparing to go home to her husband and her Tyler and her manicotti, something leaped in my chest: maybe Lou was waiting at my mother's. It hadn't occurred to me before, but wasn't out of the question. Maybe that's why Harv had to “work late.” (Come to think of it, had Harv ever had to work late before?) Maybe Lou was asking us to forgive him and let him back into our lives. Maybe he wanted to make amends for ditching us for a life of chaise longues and suntanned women and delinquent cats. Maybe life wasn't so different from a TV movie after all.

The train lurched to a sickening stop, making everyone jostle and stick out a foot for support. When the metal door slammed open—“Glendale,” the conductor intoned—we started single-filing out like a fire drill on a school bus. My legs felt watery as I stepped into the muggy August evening. The air was like a locker room: damp, warm, too close. As the business-people headed for their respective SUVs, the parking lot a chorus of bleeps, chirps, and spastic, flashing headlights, I commenced the three-block walk to 118 Greenlaw Avenue.

The neighborhood was strangely empty. It had the fixed quality of a movie set, everything bright and still, as if caught in time. As I walked, I had the eerie sensation of my life in the present unraveling, peeling back, giving rise to the echoes of other ages and other walks. It was like my own home movie, in reverse. First: summer. I am seventeen, earrings grazing the tops of my shoulders, hair gelled flat to my skull. I'm dressed in some senseless combination of long underwear and men's boxer shorts, clinging damply to the hand of Jordan Prince as he drones on about the “'phone” and the “timpani dudes,” his blond eyebrows popping up every few seconds over the tops of his
Top Gun
-style shades.

Then it's fall. I am fifteen, angry, and entitled, pounding these same sidewalks with Z Tedesco as we choke down Marlboro Reds. We sigh and spit and vent bitterly about our home lives, Z's forehead swathed in an Axl-esque bandanna that droops down his back like a human tail. He is railing against his overbearing mother and father while I half pay attention, thinking of my own mother camped frozen in front of
Fantasy Island
and my father drifting vaguely around the West Coast, and nodding at Z, blood galloping through my veins, skin thickening by the minute.

Or I am ten. Heading home from school with my brand-new best friend Hannah. Our lunchboxes (hers Strawberry Shortcake, mine Miss Piggy on a Harley) bang against our knees, backpacks droop around our waists, sneakers sag under the collective weight of a year's worth of friendship pins. “So what's going on with your mom and dad?” Hannah asks me, kindly, as I tag along behind her, sugar-dazed and dry-mouthed from sucking Fun Dips. I always manage to avoid her questions somehow, hiding behind a mounting repertoire of razor-sharp impressions and sarcastic knock-knock jokes.

Now, as I reached Greenlaw, my pace slowed instinctively. I had the urge to hook a sharp left and hightail it to the Devines's house, where Hannah's parents were probably still curled up on the porch grooving to Bob and Carly and drinking chai. Instead, I took Greenlaw's sidewalk square by square, careful not to step on the cracks. It was the way I'd walked as a kid. Even then, my mother had the uncanny ability to fill me with extreme anxiety; in that particular instance, over the possibility of losing my step and inadvertently breaking her back.

By the time I reached the bluebird-topped mailbox, I was practically on tiptoe. I scanned the yard. So far, everything was par for the course. The lawn was mowed, the bushes pruned, the flowers arranged in orderly rows, like tiny pink teeth. I climbed the porch steps and hesitated. For at least a minute I stared at the brass knocker, inscribed with a looping
M,
wondering for the first time in my life if I should knock first. I decided against it; best not to give up any shred of control I had left.

“Hello?” I called, pushing the door open.

No answer. No sign of Lou either, and no evidence of anything out of the ordinary. The living room was characteristically neurotic. End tables glossy with lemon-scented polish. Magazines arranged in a scallop, waiting-room style. The family photos were all evenly spaced on the mantel; in my mother's universe, each frame being of equal size and prominence meant everyone in them was equally loved.

“Eliza?” Mom's voice floated in from the kitchen. It was definitely unsteady. “Is that you?”

“Me,” I think I said.

I waded across what seemed like miles of thick, sea-green carpet zigzagged with fresh vacuum tracks. I could hear voices coming from the kitchen, multiple voices, a cacophony of voices. My mother was not alone. Already I could see the moment that would change my life forever: my father at the kitchen table with a grizzled gray beard, a web of wrinkles around his eyes, a coffee mug in his hand, and a look on his face that was worn and tired and so sorry.

When I stepped into the kitchen, the scene I found was so ordinary it was hilarious. My mother was alone. Not only that, she was hollowing a cantaloupe. She was wearing slippers and a nubbly pink bathrobe, her face was slathered in what appeared to be sour cream, UB40's “Red Red Wine” (a.k.a. the cacophony) was pseudorapping on the stovetop radio and the kitchen table was not just empty, but aggressively empty, blank except for a salt shaker and two rubber placemats shaped like watermelons.

I don't know what surprised me more: the fact that Lou wasn't waiting for me, or the way my heart hurt to admit it.

“What is it?” Mom asked. She had turned away from the counter, hands oozing cantaloupe guts. How my father would have despised this picture: a melon baller, wrinkle concealer, a processed tune from the late '80s. It screamed so much suburbia. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

I felt a surge of anger at her. For seeing through the look on my face. For introducing the terribly perfect word “ghost” into this moment. For letting me get my hopes so far up by inviting me to dinner in the first place.

“Maybe it was just your face,” I snapped.

As soon as I said it, I felt badly. I just couldn't stop myself. In this house I was sixteen again. I was fourteen. Thirteen. Eight. I was piercing my ears and locking myself in my room and blasting Twisted Sister's “We're Not Gonna Take It” and inscribing my name on every pure, unmarked surface I could find—foggy bathroom mirrors, the smooth tops of new I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!s—just to make her mad. I was angry that Lou wasn't there to see me, angry at myself for believing he would be. And, somehow, it seemed natural to hold my mother responsible for all of it.

I did feel bad about snapping at her, though. I prepared for Mom to fire back—this is what she and I did best, after all—but she just gestured mildly to the stove and said: “Keep an eye on the casserole, will you?”

If she'd retorted, I could have felt less guilty. I could have volleyed back with, “What kind of casserole? Moose?” and the evening's sparring would have been underway. Instead I said, “What kind?”

“Tuna,” my mother replied, and left the room.

It might seem odd that a life-changing moment could hinge on a tuna fish casserole. By all accounts, the gesture should be something grand, something sentimental, something along the lines of reuniting on a ship deck or singing gaily while wearing plaid and hiking the Alps. But the fact that my mother had made this dinner, my dinner, the same bland, boring, beige dinner I'd been torturing her with for three years of Sunday dinners, was comparable to another mother forking over a kidney or a family heirloom.

I cracked open the oven, peered through the blast of heat. Sure enough, a tuna casserole was browning nicely at the edges. Shutting the door gently, I peeked into the saucepan, gave some peas an apologetic stir, then scooped up the empty melon rinds and dumped them in the trash can. When Mom returned, she was wearing jeans and a pale blue sweatshirt that said
HELLO FROM ORLANDO
! Her face was scrubbed pink.