Split Just Right (12 page)

“So you’re interested in writing violent books?” he asked at one point.

“Not exactly,” I answered. “I was just in a bad mood the day I wrote about the girl cutting off her hair.”

“Do you consider yourself to have a bad temper?” he asked.

“Not really,” I answered. The conversation never got much better than
that,
although we had a couple of good minutes talking about the 76ers’ odds of making the NBA playoffs.

After breakfast I was full of stress and eggs Benedict, and my stomach wasn’t having the greatest reaction to either. Rick Finzimer dropped me off at the apartment in his parents’ sedan and said, “See ya in a few.” I waved to him as he drove away and then crawled back into bed to sleep.

And now, here I am, breakfast barely digested, about to sit down to another strange meal that I don’t really want to eat.

“Isn’t this nice?” Mom asks nobody in particular as we stand in the hall. No trace of her suggests that a couple of hours before, she was carrying food trays and coffee pitchers, zooming all around the Greenhouse. Her hands are scrubbed pink and she’s even wearing her best perfume, Zanzibar, which Louis’s wife gave her six Christmases ago.

The Finzimers’ furniture is all the color of hot-dog toppings. A mustardy rug stretches through the whole downstairs and a ketchup-and-relish pattern swirls through all the matching upholstered furniture. The house seems to be made mostly of dark corners, even in the family room, which is where Mrs. Finzimer leads us since “the light’s better in here.”

We sit: my mother, my father, my grandmother, and I.

“Big Rick’s out in the woodshed,” Mrs. Finzimer says as she plumps herself deep into a recliner. “He’ll be along soon.” There’s a bag of knitting on the floor beside her; she reaches for a folded square of yellow before she thinks better of it and returns her hands to a little round ball in her lap. “I sure am sorry I couldn’t have stolen some more time to prepare a nicer lunch; this was quite a shock for me, last night. I must say I had to think quite a while before I could even put a picture of you back into my head, Susan.”

She smiles as she says this and I notice one of her front teeth is crooked. My
grandmother has a crooked front tooth.
I’ve been checking off these facts to myself the minute we pulled onto pleasant, tree-lined Poplar Avenue.
My grandparents’ house is beige-colored stucco.
My
grandfather has a woodshed.

“Well, I only visited here a few times,” Mom says, patting wisps of her hair behind her ears and leaning forward in a gesture that to me seems a little bit over-friendly “So it’s only natural you wouldn’t remember me.”

“Oh, but I do.” My grandmother nods. “It was in the summer. You were wearing a real tight miniskirt. I recall it, because it had a goldfish pattern, and because it was so tight. And your shoes with those real high—”

“Strange how I don’t remember that outfit.” Mom cuts her off with a smile. She gently bounces a shiny foil-wrapped present on her lap like a baby “Teenagers sure can be goofy, though, huh?” This statement is met with silence from the room. “We brought you something,” Mom continues chattily addressing Mrs. Finzimer. I keep wishing she’d call her a name like Paula or Mrs. Finzimer, so I’d know what to call her, but I guess Mom doesn’t know, either. “Just a silly little thing from Danny’s and my favorite tea shop in town, isn’t that right, Danny?” She half stands and passes the box to Mrs. Finzimer.

“Uh-huh,” I say, almost under my breath. These pointless conversations have been squeezing themselves out painfully from the moment we arrived. I try harder, for Mom’s sake. “More like a coffee shop.”

“Oh, how nice.” The crooked tooth appears again. “What do we have here?” She unwraps the ribbons and shiny paper, and her hands poke through the layers of tissue before pulling out six earthenware coffee mugs. “How nice,” she repeats with the exact same inflection. “Really, you shouldn’t have. They’re very nice.” She holds up a mug for Rick Finzimer to see and then she slides the box down next to her knitting.

“Just a nothing thing, really” Mom clears her throat. She crosses her legs and then crosses them the other way, smoothing a hand over the back of her skirt. It’s surprising to me that Mom decided to dress pretty normally for the visit. I was expecting her army lug-sole boots or her good-luck-dragon beaded shawl—even her blond china-doll wig, if she was really feeling the need for disguise. But in her striped red shirt and silver necklace and with her hair combed flat into a braid behind her ears, she looks like she could have been anyone’s mom.

“Do you drink a lot of coffee?” Mrs. Finzimer asks, glancing down at the mugs.

“Too much, I’m afraid.” Mom laughs apologetically

“It’s very bad for you.” Mrs. Finzimer holds up her hand and turns her face like she’s refusing a cup right at that moment. “Caffeine.”

“I never let Danny drink it,” Mom says, pointedly avoiding my deadeye.

“It can stunt your growth,” Mrs. Finzimer says, her pigeon eyes direct on me. I can’t figure out if that’s her way of telling me that I’m too tall and maybe should have enjoyed a little more caffeine when I had the chance.

“Danny’s a basketball player,” Rick Finzimer mentions. He stares out the window as he says it, his eyes captivated by the empty street outside. “She’s captain of the freshman team,” he adds.

“She’s the best player in the whole school,” Mom says. I glare at her, but the years have taught me that Mom has no bragging censor.

As soon as she got back from her Greenhouse shift this morning, Mom had made me give her every detail of my breakfast. My answers were like fertilizer; everything I said seemed to generate two or three new questions. Then Mom rehashed through stories about Rick Finzimer: their spring formal, the Broadway play, the picnic out in Valley Forge. This batch of stories must have been true, considering they were so boring and I’d heard them all before.

“Do you still like him or something?” I asked finally Mom’s face had colored and she’d ahemmed a couple of times.

“No, no, no, it’s only …” But then the phone rang and it was Rick Finzimer with directions to his parents’ house and she had talked to him forever in a quiet sweet-as-honey voice. She probably managed to get in some more brags about me during that call, too.

“Ricky played basketball.” Mrs. Finzimer nods. She stares at her son, who also nods.

“Hmm. I never was one for sports,” says Mom. “Unless yoga counts.”

I glare at Mom again for saying something so spacey and then I look down at my blue linen lap and try to take myself away from this dark room full of strangeness. I picture myself shooting baskets in the empty Bradshaw gym when it’s late afternoon in spring. The sun pours through the open doors, and all I can hear is the thud of the ball, the squeak of my shoes. I catch my breath as the ball wobbles, wavers, and then shlummphs soundly through the net. My mind takes shot after perfect shot, even after we stand up and move into the dining room for lunch.

“Sit, please.” Mrs. Finzimer beams at me and Mom. “And please, start.” I sit and immediately take a roast beef sandwich off the platter in the middle of the table. “That’s right, just dig in,” says Mrs. Finzimer, pulling back a chair across from me. Mom sits next to me and clears her throat, her fingers touching light on my spine. I straighten up and adjust my headband.

As soon as I’m into my second bite of sandwich, I feel Mrs. Finzimer’s gaze intent on me. “Well, you’re the hungry one. Is this when you normally have lunch?” she asks. “On days when you do go to school?”

My mouth is full but I feel obliged to give her an answer, so I look to Mom for help.

“Danny’s out today because it’s a special occasion,” Mom says. “It’s not every day she gets to meet her grandparents—grandmother, I guess I should say”

“What’s taking Dad so long?” Rick Finzimer suddenly jumps out of his chair and strides out of the room, shouting, “Dad! Dad! What are you doing out there? We’re starting lunch!”

“Ricky had perfect attendance records three years straight,” Mrs. Finzimer says softly smiling down at her plate. “Third grade to sixth. Not even the flu, not once, until junior high.”

Nobody answers her. The back door bangs as Rick Finzimer steps outside. My
grandparents have a squeaky back door.

As soon as he’s gone the smile drops right off Mrs. Finzimer’s soft pigeon face. She stares across the table at Mom, her arms stretched out in front of her and her hands balled into one fist, like a mallet dividing the space between them.

“He hasn’t told them, Susan,” says Mrs. Finzimer.

“I’m sorry?” Mom’s politeness smile freezes and holds.

“Ricky hasn’t told Caren and Morgan and Madison about you and ah, and ah, Danny. He’s not planning on it. Too upsetting, he thinks. And I surely don’t blame him. My boy’s had a hard enough time just getting himself on his feet, figuring out his own life. Now he’s got this baseball cap business going, and another family—his real family, in my honest opinion, and … he doesn’t need this, you know. He didn’t ask for this. None of us asked for this. Taking our name, even. I hope you don’t mind my speaking straight.”

I wonder what happened to the sweet lady who pledged twenty dollars on her credit card to raise money for her son’s alma mater. The woman I am staring at has a closed, judging face that forces us to acknowledge her distaste of us. It’s truly a punishment to have to stare back at her. I feel the warm, salty beginning of tears in my nose and eyes. I glance at Mom and for a minute I think she might cry, too. Maybe it’s her braided hair or the normal clothes, but she looks more like a younger, shyer version of the regular mom I know. She doesn’t cry, though. She looks scared but she smiles, instead, and takes a deep breath. When she speaks, her voice is cold as the sweat that breaks across my forehead, but the sound of it dries up all my thoughts of tears.

“I think maybe you need to get one thing straight here,” Mom begins. Her chin is level to the table and she speaks in loud, calm, careful words. “My daughter and I have done more than okay for ourselves for fourteen years.” Her face loses its fear and her voice builds slowly the way it sometimes does onstage, and I feel a kind of shelter in it. “Fourteen years. And no one worries about us except us. That’s the way we like it. No matter what our last name happens to be, we’re all the family we need. Anything else”—she presses the palms of her hands against the edge of the table and the skin under her eyes tightens for a moment, like a pulse point—“anything else is as unexpected as it is unnecessary.”

The room is quiet, until I remember that my mouth is full of roast beef, which I then swallow with a loud
gulunk.

Mrs. Finzimer takes a baby sip from her water glass and licks her lips several times after she’s done.

“Well, good then,” she says.

When Rick Finzimer comes back in, Mrs. Finzimer unpacks her crooked-tooth smile and cements it right back on her face like nothing happened. I take another sandwich off the tray, although I can feel my stomach groaning from the weight of too much food.

“Dad’s not … he isn’t …” Rick Finzimer makes a limp gesture with his shoulders as he sits back down to the lunch. “He’s busy.”

“We’ll just have to get along without him, huh?” Mom clasps her hands together. Her voice has changed; suddenly it’s loud and full of pep and she reminds me of someone. Then I guess who. Mom has melted into an imitation of perky Mrs. Paulson. A pretty fair one, too.

Two can play that game, I decide. Because right now, deciding to be someone else (finally
, in one of the most difficult roles ever given to a child actor
…) seems like not a bad idea. I raise my eyebrows and drop my chin, holding myself up straight. I look at my grandmother and try to think of what Antonia de Ver White’s eyes would see.

“Tell me more about your cats,” I say pleasantly “They’re so beautiful.”

“Why, let me think.” Mrs. Finzimer settles back with a thoughtful, storytelling look in her eye. “I must have started on my first cat just after Nixon was elected.”

After lunch, Rick Finzimer makes another trip out to the woodshed and Mrs. Finzimer retreats to the kitchen to make a pot of decaffeinated tea and dessert. She doesn’t let us help her.

“Go on out to the porch, enjoy the early spring,” she says, shooing us off with her hands. “I’ll be right along.”

So Mom and I find ourselves alone on the porch in weather that’s just a little bit too cold to be pleasant. We sit on the rocking chairs with only the cats to watch over us, and we rock back and forth in uncertain, wood-creaking silence.

“This is just terrible,” I finally whisper.

“The pits,” she agrees.

“If I could go back in time I would have looked a lot more carefully at those envelopes.” I hold my face in my hands and shake my head. “It’s so easy for me to get lost in my own little world and do flaky, distracted things like that.”

“We all need our own little worlds, sometimes,” Mom says quietly. “I remember I made up this game when you were little, and we were still living in Philadelphia. I’d push you in your stroller and we’d walk in a straight line down Walnut Street, and I’d imagine that every block would unwind a year of my life, and then I’d think back on all the years of mistakes I made, like the year I ran away from my first foster home, the year I fell in love with Rick, the year I didn’t try for that navy scholarship because I could only do four push-ups, which seemed like more of an obstacle at the time.

“Anyway, when I’d undone all those years, then I’d turn around and we’d walk back a new, different way, though Rittenhouse Square or Old City. That’s when I’d make up exactly how I would have changed each year, made it work out better for us.”

“For you,” I correct. “If you undid the year you met him, you would undo the year of having me, right?” I glance at her out of the corners of my eyes.

Mom looks even smaller than usual, like she would break if you touched her. Her face is thoughtful and she leans way back in her rocking chair, her hands gripping the sides and she drops her chin back like a little kid, staring way up at the porch eaves. She tips so far back that I have a hand braced to catch her in case she falls over.