Helens-of-Troy (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

“Do you have to bring that?” Helen
Bocelli pleaded with her daughter.

“Yes I do,” Ellie replied, holding the
yellow ragged teddy bear under her arm. “It’s my continuity. You
may have moved me several times in my life, city-to-city,
uncle-to-uncle, dad-to-dad, wherever — but Beastie Bear here, he
always comes with me. Taking away my security so early in life
could cause irreparable damage. I would have thought that was
covered in those parenting magazines you’ve subscribed to over the
years.”

“You’re fifteen, Ellie,” Helen sighed,
“so I’ll ask you again, nicely. Isn’t it time you let go of that
ragged old bear?”

Ellie looked at her mother in mocked
horror, her newly applied black lipstick adding forced drama to the
dropped-jaw look she was trying hard to pull off. She flicked her
long black hair over her shoulder in defiance before assuming a
stance of implied superiority.

“Do you have to bring THAT?” she asked
her mother, pointing to a van in the driveway. “I mean, I’m glad
you’re dumping him, but don’t you think it’s time you let go
yourself? By law I think he gets fifty-percent of your communal
property, and I’m thinking the stupid van is a good place to start.
Put it on his side of the equation.”

Helen studied the white vehicle. It was
an eyesore. “I’m just borrowing it, Ellie,” she said. “Our stuff
won’t fit in the back of the BMW. I have to get us to your Nan’s
somehow.”

“In a van marked ‘TONY’S EXTERMINATING
SERVICE’? I’m sure Nan will be impressed. I can hear her neighbors
now. ‘Do you have cockroaches, Mrs. LaRose’? No, that’s just my
daughter and granddaughter coming to live with me for a while. They
like to travel in style.”

Helen sighed.

“Think about this, Mom,” Ellie
continued. “Do you actually think it will be easy for me to make
friends when my mother makes me show up in a bug-mobile? Like,
hello?”

Helen looked for the slightest sign of
compassion in her daughter’s make-up blackened eyes. There was
none.

“What?” Ellie asked. “Is there
something wrong with my thought process or something? I’m a
straight-A student, so that would be a bit questionable, but I
suppose it could happen.”

Helen admitted to herself that her
daughter had a point.

“I know, I know. Just get in the van,
Ellie,” she sighed. “I’ll be bringing it back to Tony once we’ve
settled in.” She felt a loose strand of hair fall down across her
neck. She reached back and placed it back into the bun at the back
of her head.

There is nothing worse, Helen thought
to herself, than having a fifteen-year-old daughter who is more
together than you are.

Helen had agonized about leaving her
husband Tony and moving Ellie to a new home for weeks, but Ellie
had packed her bags in less than an hour when she had told her the
news. In fact, Helen realized, it was almost as if Ellie had been
expecting it.

“Don’t your feel just a little bit sad,
Ellie?” she asked, throwing the last suitcase into the
van.

Ellie could barely contain herself.
“He’s a loser, Mom,” she said. “Always was, always will be. I don’t
know what you ever saw in him. He’s not good looking, he’s not
rich, he’s just ― hairy. But I’ll pretend to be sad if you want me
to be.”

Ellie pouted, pulling her black
lipsticked bottom lip out as far as she could, just for
effect.

Helen thought for a moment before
answering her daughter. Tony was ungodly hairy. “What did I see in
him? I don’t know. I suppose I was looking for a protector for us.
Tony is big and strong. He’s really a nice man, Ellie. You just
never gave him a chance.”

“Do you have one of those fun-house
mirrors in your bedroom or something? Tony? Big and strong?” Ellie
snapped back. “Mom, the man has a complex. He likes to kill things
for a living. He keeps referring to himself in the third person as
“The Exterminator,” in this weird Schwarzenegger-type voice. That
alone should have been your first clue. Is he Austrian? No. Should
he really have an accent of any kind? No. He was born here. Has he
ever even been to a foreign country? No. He’s a
suburban-pest-controller-hit-man-wanna-be and I’m glad we’re
leaving.”

“How do you really feel, Ellie?” Helen
commented, opening the passenger door angrily. Ellie had pushed her
too far. “Get in the van. Enough of the lip for a little while,
okay? I want to get to Nan's before it gets too late. And for your
information, Tony and I went to an exterminator conference once, in
Mexico. So he has been out of the country. For a day or
two.”

“There’s really such a thing as an
exterminator conference?” Ellie rolled her eyes at her mother. “I
stand corrected.”

“Grow up, Ellie,” Helen said, hopping
into the driver’s seat and fastening her seatbelt. She started the
van up. The muffler made a huge racket.

“So much for sneaking into town,” Ellie
said. “I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with making a grand
entrance. It’s a good thing I’m flexible. Be proud that you’ve
raised a daughter that isn’t frightened by change. I’ll go far in
life.”

As Helen put the van into gear, Beastie
Bear did a face-plant from his spot on the dashboard.

“It’s probably from the fumes in this
van,” Ellie commented. “Can’t you smell it, Mom? It’s disgusting in
here. It’s kind of a mix of powdered insecticide, dead bugs, an old
gym bag and a hint of pepperoni. There may even be notes of alcohol
on the nose, and that’s not good for a scent. Eau-de-knock-off.”
She reached down and pulled a beer bottle out from under her seat.
“Ah ha! The nose never lies.”

Rolling down the window, Ellie tossed
the bottle onto the lawn, much to her mother’s dismay. “We wouldn’t
want to be pulled over with it in the car, would we?" Ellie asked
with mock innocence. “That muffler is like a magnet for the cops.
Come ticket me, I’m noisy. Hmm, maybe I’d better check under your
seat too, Mom.”

Helen took a sniff of the air. There
was an odd chemical smell in the vehicle, but that was pretty much
an occupational hazard. “Okay, you’re right about the van. I’ll get
it back here and make the swap for the convertible as soon as I
can.” She looked over at Beastie Bear. He looked like he had passed
out. “Tell you what, Ellie,” she said, reaching over and propping
him back up, “I’ll let you out around the block from Nan’s if you’d
like, okay? You don’t have to show up in the van. I’d walk with
you, but you know, we’ve got all this baggage we’re carrying. I
mean luggage. Wrong choice of noun.”

Ellie laughed. “Thanks Mom, but you’ll
need my smart mouth around to protect you when the neighbors see
the van. You haven’t stood up to verbal abuse very well
lately.”

Right again, Helen thought. There was a
time when she could joust with her daughter for hours, quite
impressed with the vocabulary of her child. But now Ellie was a
teenager and that same vocabulary was thrown at her in a whole new
way. And even though her daughter probably needed her more than
ever, lately Helen’s own words of wisdom had been coming out all
wrong, or worse yet, not at all.

“I could follow you in the Beemer. I
know how to drive,” Ellie pleaded hopefully.

“How do you know how to drive?” Helen
screeched, without realizing she was doing so. “Never mind. I don’t
want to know. No, you can’t drive the coupe. Tony bought it for me,
and I will not have you smashing it up. It took a lot of dead
cockroaches to pay for that car, I’ll have you know.” She adjusted
the rear view mirror. The sun was beginning to set behind them.
“Wait, maybe I do want to know. Who taught you to drive? Did Tony
teach you how to drive? Because he’s a really bad driver, so don’t
listen to him.”

“Tony’s bad at a lot of things, so I
don’t ever listen to him. What happened to Dave?” Ellie asked,
changing the subject. “I liked Dave.”

“You were five and Dave liked you a
little too much. You’re not much of a judge of
character.”

“Tony doesn’t like me at all. So much
for your own character assessing abilities. I would have thought
that would have mattered to you, you know, that your new husband at
least be civil to your daughter. What makes you think we need a
protector anyway? We were doing fine with Bill. Remember Bill? Bill
was great. People used to say I looked like him, even though he
wasn’t my dad. Why would you leave Bill for Tony?”

“It’s complicated,” Helen answered. As
much as she tried to be open with her daughter, there were some
things she just couldn’t tell her.

“That’s your answer to
everything.”

“Well everything is
complicated.”

“Fine,” Ellie sighed, and began to chew
her black, polished fingernails. She avoided looking at her
mother.

“Are you nervous about something,
Ellie?” Helen finally asked. “This nail-biting thing is relatively
new for you. There’s some gum in the glove compartment, if you’d
prefer to chew on lovely mint flavor rather than old nail varnish.”
It seemed like only a few months ago that she had argued with Ellie
about cutting the very same fingernails. They had grown so long
they were starting to curl downward on their own.

“You’re taking me to live with a woman
I hardly know, in a town I’ve never heard of, where I have no
friends. What’s there to be nervous about?” Ellie asked
sarcastically, reaching for the glove compartment door. She opened
and closed it quickly. “Don’t even ask what’s in there,” she said,
her eyes opened wide in shock.

“Ah, so underneath that cool Goth
exterior you’ve personified for yourself, the old, sweet,
apprehensive, Ellie of old still exists,” Helen smiled to
herself.

“Something like that. It’s
complicated.”

Her daughter was a bright one, Helen
knew. Sometimes it made dealing with her all the more difficult. “I
know you think I’m the most un-cool mother on the face of the
earth...”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Mom. You’re at
least the third,” Ellie smirked, the corners of her mouth curling
up goofily like some character on MAD TV.

That was it. No more late night
television for her, Helen decided. “As I was trying to tell you
before you immaturely made that face at me—and I hope it stays that
way just to teach you a lesson—I know a little about the Goth look
myself, you know. It’s not exactly a new statement you’re making
there. It’s been around for generations. It’s a very old European
style, dating back centuries. As in, ancient. You don’t want to
look ancient, do you?”

“I don’t know about ancient, but
nineteen would be good. What are you trying to say,
Mom?”

“Ellie, do you think maybe you could
take off the Goth make-up before we get to Nan's?”

Ellie looked at her mother as if she
had lost her mind. “It’s my style.”

“Look!” Helen said, pointing out the
van window. “There’s a Biggie Mart. Maybe we can find you a new
style.”

“Mom, we’ve discussed this before.
There’s nothing wrong with how I dress. Nothing’s too short,
nothing’s hanging out—nothing. If you think about what I could be
wearing, I think you’ll find you’ve got it made. I could dress like
a slutty, schoolgirl/pop-star and maybe somebody like Dave would
come along and…”

“Okay, okay, I get the picture. But
Ellie, look at it from my perspective. We’re going to your Nan’s,
and today is Halloween. She’s going to think it’s a costume. She’ll
say, ‘Ellie, you look so cute!’ But the joke will be on her when
she realizes you dress like this all the time. Not just for pagan
festivals, but at Christmas, and Mother’s Day, and whatever other
three hundred and sixty two days of the year there are.”

“Mom, you’re exaggerating. I take the
make-up off at night. So you can take Christmas Eve out of the
scenario and revise your count. Which is a little off, I might add,
given that there is probably more than one pagan festival a
year.”

“That will be a relief to her, I’m
sure.”

“I’m her granddaughter. She’ll love me
no matter what.”

“You think so, do you? Try calling her
‘Grandma’. She’ll claim you belong to the neighbors.” Helen ran her
finger across her throat execution style “Or kill you, so you never
utter those words again.”

“She will not.”

“Give it a try, see what happens,”
Helen shrugged.

Ellie sadly watched in the side mirror
as every familiar landmark became smaller in the distance. She
tried to remember what her grandmother was like, but it had been a
long time since she had seen her. She remembered liking her, and
she remembered that her mother didn’t. Which made her wonder why
they were going there in the first place?

“Do you think I’m going to embarrass
her or something?” Ellie asked pensively.

“The thought had crossed my
mind.”

“And parking a van in front of her
house, a van that’s side-painted with a dead cockroach lying on its
back, won’t? Thanks a lot.”

“So we’re back to the van again. I hate
it when you’re right. Look, when we get to Nan's, let’s pretend we
like each other, at least tonight. Okay?”