Split Just Right (9 page)

“Helen!” Joanne Field-Sterns greets me with a warm lipsticky kiss. She played my mother, Mrs. Keller, during my moment of Bellmont infamy

“Hi, Joanne. Who are you?”

“Audrey, the shameless country wench.” She flips her skirts. “Do I look slatternly?” She pushes up her mouth and flutters her eyelashes like Marilyn Monroe. Coal gray age lines have been etched on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes. The lines look fake up close, but onstage they’ll magically transform Joanne into an old lady.

“If you want to, I guess,” I say, as she starts kicking up her skirts like a cancan dancer. Some of the Bellmont Players can get a little nutty on you. I push down the line of chairs and women, just in time to catch an earful of Mom replaying her version of Old Yeller’s breakdown.

“And there we were for what seemed like hours, just sopping wet, and I tell you, I had no idea what I was going to do, and Danny’s practically in tears—oh, Danny, I was just telling …” Mom looks up from the mirror, where she’s drawing a heavy black crow’s feather of eyebrow over her eye.

I wave to Laura Drinker, Patsy Tepta, and someone I don’t know. Their faces, all in full pancake stage makeup, are odd goldfish colors of yellow and orange. The dressing room is overwarm, overcrowded, and over-bright from the dozens of exposed lightbulbs framing the dressing-room mirrors.

“Mom, can I talk to you for a second?” I move behind her, sharing the space in the mirror with her, and we look at ourselves and each other both at once. Mom arranges a smile on her face.

“Sure,” she says, perky as a Kahani’s ad. I feel the other women exchanging looks and they tactfully begin to sidle away from us, down toward the other end of the dressing room. I wait until they’re all pretty much out of earshot.

“Okay, look,” I begin quietly “I need to talk with you about something, but it’s really hard to just jump in the middle of what I want to say, because—”

“Please don’t tell me it’s a blue slip in math. Danny, you promised you were going to get extra help on Tuesdays.”

“Actually, I wanted to talk about the Greenhouse and this job that you’re conveniently not telling me about.”

Done. It’s out, and suddenly I feel like the words need a lot more space to float around in.

“So what about it?” she asks. She makes her mouth a little knot and her one penciled-in eyebrow pushes down hard over her eye like a black lightning bolt.

“Well.” I shake back my hair in a purposeful, Portia way. “I don’t understand why you’ve kept this a secret from me.”

“No secret. I’m on for three lunch shifts and two dinners, and I’m going to permanently pick up Sunday brunch when I get good enough. Okay?”

“Give me a break; you were too keeping it a secret and the whole school knows. Even Portia knew before me.”

“I only thought I’d have the job for a couple weeks, until I figured out something better.”

“You sure couldn’t have figured out anything worse.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Mom’s face, closed as a button, doesn’t make it easy for me to think out my next words.

“Okay, all right. Here’s the thing. Why’re you being a waitress when there’s so many other—I’m not saying much better—but other jobs? Like if you were a receptionist or a salesperson in a clothes store like Gemma Bench’s mom, or a, even a dental hygienist maybe. I mean, you’re
serving
people, any old people, who could just walk in there, like, like, Mr. Sallese. Or Portia. Just anyone. The Finns, even.”

I breathe hard. Even the ceiling seems to pin us down into the strain of this moment. It’s like the worms wiggled out of their can and sprouted from my hair, Medusa style. I take a step backward, trying to air out the damage. It’s an ugly feeling, spitting out my darkest inside thoughts, especially when I see in Mom’s reaction a face I only sometimes catch a glimpse of underneath all the other faces she wears. It strikes me now how young Mom’s face is, almost like a kid’s face, so different from the other Bradshaw moms.

When she speaks, her eyes don’t leave my reflection in the mirror.

“Danny, you listen very clearly so you don’t miss any of my words. Because right now you and I, we need money now. Waitressing pays well over any amount of money I could make selling blouses or answering phones. The Greenhouse also lets me keep Bradshaw hours and if I have to quit Bradshaw, you have to quit, too. And then you can go to Foxwood High. Maybe that’d be fun for you, Danny; we’ll go buy you a bulletproof vest, combat boots, pack a gun in your lunch-box—”

“Forget it,” I mumble. “I just meant that it’s kind of embarrassing.”

I half hoped I’d spoken inside my head; a thought, like a whisper, meant only for me. But I’d said it out loud. And now Mom swivels in her chair and stares at me with an almost frightened smile on her face, a frozen, disbelieving smile like I knocked the words right out of her. She stares at me like I’m a stranger and all she knows about me is that she doesn’t like me.

“I can’t look at you right now,” she finally says. “You go away, I can’t look at you right now.”

“Fine.” I slam out of the dressing room.

Of course there’s nowhere to go, but the last thing I want to do is listen to Mom onstage, reciting her lines and singing and making jokes with Louis.

“I can’t look at you, either,” I say to her pictures in the lobby I sit in the lobby armchair and work on my homework, and then on impulse pull my laptop out of my book bag and type:

Dear Rick Finzimer (Dad):

You probably got that card I sent you and thought I was some kind of JAPHTA—that’s what my friend Portia and I call eighth graders. It stands for Just Another PinHead TagAlong. But I promise I won’t start asking you for money, or whatever you think my plan is, getting in touch with you. It’s not as though I’m plotting to run away and live with you, either.

Anyhow, the other day I was riding the train and across the seat from me I saw this man who looked sort of the way I picture you. He wore this gray hat that kept sliding over his eyes, no matter how many times he pushed it back. It got me wondering, watching him, if you think about me the way I think about you, like if sometimes a picture of me falls over your eyes that you keep having to push back. Because there’s lots of times I have to push back your picture.

Sometimes when Mom and I are in an argument (for instance, right now we are, which is why it’s on my mind) I wish I had someone else in my family, kind of a fallback person, you know what I mean? Sometimes a family of two people is difficult, because if you aren’t both on the same side, then your side is made up of just you. Which can be a little lonely, especially if you’re not in the mood to be with just yourself.

So, that’s all. I promise this is my last letter. Except if I do something like get married or win the Nobel Prize (ha!), then I’d let you know. I think.

Sincerely, Dandelion L. Finzimer

When I read back through the letter, I can’t decide if the whole thing seems too personal. Maybe I should stick to subjects most people feel more comfortable with, like sports or the weather.

Louis gives us a lift home, and he and Mom keep up a steady flow of conversation, but I know from the way she doesn’t look at me that mending the rift that separates us will take some time.

Later that night, I can’t sleep. The water stain on my ceiling changes shape, from a horse kicking up its legs to a man with a ponytail holding a barbell. My eyes are dry in their sockets, and I have to turn my clock radio away from me so I won’t keep noticing the minutes flip into each other. Finally, I slide out of bed and turn on the light in hopes that reading
The Odyssey
might do the trick. It’s hard to sleep on my anger.

The Cyclops chapter turns out to be not too deadly dull, and then I proof one more time through my creative-juiced story entry. I print it out and in the corner of an envelope I write my address and name, Antonia de Ver White. It looks elegant and professional.

I also print a copy of my letter to Rick Finzimer before I can second-guess myself, and then I fold the letter and the contest entry into their envelopes and kiss them both for luck. My eyes finally get that good scratchy feeling, and my dreams are full of prizes and reconciliations.

“Y
OU WANT TO HEAR
a story about Susan?” Gary puffs. Corkscrew snarls of hair are stuck to his forehead, and sweat collects in the hollow of his neck.

“Gary, you’re losing steam,” I laugh, looking at him. Underneath my arms and knees it’s still dry as chalk. “We’re at the homestretch, anyway. Twenty more minutes.”

The AIDS walkathon ended up seeing a pretty heavy turnout, probably because of the early taste of spring in the air. Pale sun shines from a cloud-fluffed sky, and the rowing shells skimming over the Schuylkill River move as lightly as two-, four-, and eight-legged mosquitoes. All around us, people are walking and laughing and talking, and everywhere is the squishy smell of stirred-up mud. We’re just rounding the bend of Kelly Drive where the art museum curves up at our left. Gary and I were close to the front lines of walkers at the beginning, but now other people are passing us. Friday pants and strains impatiently at his leash.

“Sorry, boy,” I tell him. “I’d go faster, too; it’s your old man who’s keeping us back in the geriatric section.”

“I need more B-12 vitamins,” Gary huffs, trying to pick up speed. “Maybe more calcium.”

“Tell me. Tell me your story about Mom.” I feel like I’ve been talking too long anyway, finally dumping out all my problems of Mom and the Greenhouse and Hannah and smirking Mrs. Finn in a junk pile at Gary’s feet. He’s easy to talk to, though, because he never wastes time inflicting me with useless, out-of-touch adult advice. Gary just listens and then tells me funny stories to make me forget my problems.

“I’ll tell you if you slow down for a minute. Must have been about ten, twelve years ago, when you were still little,” Gary starts, and then he smiles at me, and I know he’s remembering some dopey thing about how cute I was when I was little. I ignore his smile and stare ahead.

“Yeah?”

“Well, Susie was going to Hair Express to get her coloring done by this character, I’ll never forget her name. Fiona. Fiona’d given Susie a whole spiel of how she was working twenty million jobs, saving money to send her boyfriend to night school, and how she lived in a little row house with about eighteen sisters and a sick dog, ek setra, ek setra. Your basic extreme hard-luck case, I forget all the details. But Fiona’s constantly doing a terrible job on Susie’s hair. Ugh, she looked like—remember Tina Turner’s hair in
Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome?
Like that. And this was before Susie went red, you know, she was a peroxide blond. So you need a pro for those kinds of chemicals.”

“Gary, is this story on the right track to an ending?”

“Pipe down there, Wombat.” Gary teases a snarl out of the Walkman cord hooked around his neck. “Unless you want me to turn on my music instead.”

“I’m listening, I’m listening.”

“So Susie’s in there, bonding with Fiona, listening to her gripe, while at the same time Fiona’s just
butchering
Susie’s hair: parts yellow, parts white, parts still that nectarine color when the dye doesn’t pick up. And Susie’d been trying for weeks to think of a way to tell Fiona that she was switching to A Cut Above, but finally she just blurts out, ‘I hate to tell you this, Fiona, but today’s the last time I can come here because my company’s moving me to Israel.’”

“Israel?” I snort. “Why’d she say that?”

“She said it was just the first thing that popped into her head; Bellmont was doing
Jesus Christ Superstar,
and her mind was sort of thinking down that line. But, so, Fiona goes, ‘Well, I guess I won’t be seeing you around anymore,’ ek setra, and—”

“Et cet-er-a,” I say. “It’s Latin. It means, ‘and the rest’—”

“Hey, Breedshow princess. Do you want to hear the end of this story?”

“Yes, sorry. Keep going.”

“So Susie was so paranoid that Fiona would find out that all she did was change hairdressers, not countries, that Susie actually bought some sunglasses and a wig. She kept them in her pocketbook for over a year. We’d be out shopping or something, and Susie’d get these phantom Fiona sightings and start going, ‘Gary Gary, help me put on my wig!’ And it’d be on all crooked with her real hair falling out. She was out of her mind at the idea Fiona’d know she was still in Foxwood. She also took all these long ways around town so she’d never get in the vicinity of Hair Express.”

“Hey, Aesop, is there a moral here?”

“Not really,” Gary huffs. “Except that Susie’s a little bit batty. Let’s pick up some speed now. I’m feeling strong. Maybe after, we can race up and down the steps of the art museum.”

When I think about it later that afternoon, though, I see why Gary picked that story. Mom tends to create a lot of trouble for herself when all she wants to do is to get out of a little trouble. And once she’s convinced herself of a plan, she has a tough time abandoning it. It’d be hard to know how long Mom thought she could hide her job from me; if I hadn’t said anything, she might have held me off for months.

Now we’re in a not-speak, a stalemate that I don’t think either of us knows how to break. I even took the earlier train in yesterday morning so I didn’t have to talk to her. It depressed me; usually when Old Yeller’s in the shop and Mom and I have to take the train, we’ll get breakfast together at the Stationhouse Café, splitting the pancake-and-eggs special. Yesterday I just got a corn muffin.

I know I should apologize, and I want to, but underneath my apology feelings hide thick wrinkles of resentment. Why should I be the one to go to her, when she was the one who kept her secret from me in the first place?

She spends most of the weekend in rehearsal and so her refrigerator messages to me are brief, without my name, without “XO’s” or “Love, Mom’s.”

Please write a check for the exterminator. Remember to put the towels in the dryer.

We need bagels.

Cold as the tone of the notes is, for some reason I can’t toss them in the garbage can as usual. I put them in the silverware drawer instead.