The Noah Confessions

Thanks to Beverly Horowitz for coaxing the story out of me with the right amount of persuasion, encouragement, and deadline. Thanks to Rebecca Gudelis for keeping the time-line monster in his cage and dressed for dinner. Thanks to my agent, Cynthia Manson, for her tireless enthusiasm, to the W.F.'s for putting up with the disappearing act, Dave Marsh for the porch I almost used, and my sister, Karen, for always getting it.

What I've figured out about my family
by me, Jacqueline Julia “Lynnie” Russo

SIXTEEN

â¢ 1 â¢

It was my sixteenth birthday and my father wouldn't buy me a car.

This was all the talk at Hillsboro, the fancy girls' prep school I attended in Los Angeles, which we all pretended to hate but secretly adored.

I thought he had been teasing me all this time. He used to do that when I was little, telling me the Powers that Be had canceled Christmas or moved Disneyland. I never believed him. It just made me laugh. So I thought it was part of the routine when he kept saying, “I'm serious, Lynnie, no car.”

“Right, Dad.”

“This is for real.”

“I get it.”

Obviously, I didn't get it.

When I woke up that day and tore into the jewelry box sitting in the empty cereal bowl, I didn't find a gleaming Volkswagen key. I found a dull silver charm bracelet with birds on it.

You read that right. A charm bracelet. With birds on it.

My father, who was not a stupid man, smiled and waited. I just stared at him with my jaw unhinged.

“It's a charm bracelet,” he said.

“Yeah, with birds on it.”

He said, “It's vintage.”

“Right.”

“Do you like it?”

“Dad, come on, where's the real present?”

His face deflated and I felt horrible and horrified at the same time.

“I told you. There is no car.”

“You were serious?”

“I told you.”

“But why?”

“Because you don't need a car. You barely know how to drive.”

“That's not the point.”

He sat down next to me and held the bird bracelet up.

“Sweetie, this belonged to your mother.”

That didn't have the effect he was hoping for. I already had a lot of my mother's jewelry, all of it nicer than this.

But he had that look on his face that he got whenever my mother came up. I couldn't torture him, no matter how mad I was. I just kissed him and took the bracelet and went upstairs to dress. I put it on because I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but it was all kinds of ugly. First, it didn't appear to be real silver. More like nickel. And the birds were deformed-looking, some of them with their wings and beaks chipped off. It wasn't close to something I'd ever wear. It wasn't even something my mother would wear.

The whole ordeal felt like a punishment. I hadn't done anything wrong except turn sixteen. And he couldn't be mad at me about that.

The ride to school that day was quiet. As we cruised along the Pacific Coast Highway, I glanced at the ocean and the surfers bobbing in the waves. I wondered what they were thinking. Then I remembered that surfers mostly didn't think. So I wondered what they were feeling, hurling themselves into the arctic water before breakfast.

I'd always wanted to try it. Normally I'd say a thing like that out loud to my father, but today I was quiet.

As we merged onto the 10 freeway, my father said, “Gee, feels like you could hang meat in here.”

“Oh, did you say something? I couldn't hear you over the sound of my heart smashing into pieces.”

“Sweetie, the thing about the car, it's complicated.”

I had no response to that.

“And I thought you'd like the bracelet.”

I twisted it on my wrist and felt the birds poking into my skin.

I always understood that I might not get a
new
car, because he thought that was showy and spoiled and I didn't disagree. In fact, I was relishing the idea of being the pragmatic, environmentally sensitive, politically correct girl. I had speeches prepared about my used VW Beetle. “You know, even the hybrid SUVs burn more fossil fuels than my car, and they break down more often, which is bad for the environment.” I had no idea if this was true.

This wasn't about showing off. All the girls in my circle pretended
not
to be rich. It wasn't cool to be rich. We tried to act middle class and socially responsible. We worried about people in Somalia and women in burkas and the disappearing rain forests, and we hated Humvees and we thought everyone should be eating a third less meat. The only area where we were willing to exhibit some rampant consumerism was in the area of the car. You got one on your sixteenth birthday. You just did.

Except me. I just didn't.

As we approached the school I said, “Any idea of what I should say to people? I mean, you never fully explained it.”

“Tell them we're not from here.”

“But I am from here.”

“Then tell them I'm not. I do things differently. Blame it on your horrible, mean, miserly father and his cracker background.”

I didn't know how to break it to him that this approach would not fly. We were all from L.A., regardless of where our parents grew up, and if there was anything resembling a connection to another place, unless it was Europe, we all denied it. The fact that my parents grew up somewhere in the swamps of the South, where no one speaks correctly, let alone knows how to vote, well, that just was not going to come up over our lunches of seaweed and brown rice on the finely manicured lawn of Hillsboro.

Besides, the fact that he was not from here was a totally lame excuse. He was a lawyer, which was embarrassing, but he was an ACLU lawyer before he went into private practice, which meant he spent a respectable amount of time worried about the poor, the disenfranchised, issues of diversity, and so on. Every year they called on him to present the civics award. I always blushed when he stood up to make the speech. But when he started talking I relaxed, because his voice had a silvery quality and he looked like a middle-aged rock star. You would be able to glance at him in a mall or a grocery store and say, “That guy was once cool.”

So the car ordeal didn't make sense. Except it did. In a way that we could not discuss.

We pulled up in front of the school, behind the cars of eighth and ninth graders being driven by their parents. Upperclassmen were parking their cars across the street, in the lot that required a special decal.

“I really don't see why this is such a big deal,” he said as I got out, dragging my backpack.

I held my tongue hard. I had never said it to him in all this time, in eight years, no matter how tempted I had been, I hadn't said it and I didn't want to start now.

“Bye, Dad.” I slammed the door.

Mom would have understood. That's what I didn't say.

â¢ 2 â¢

Zoe and Talia were my best friends. Zoe was short and cute with curly hair and she never stopped talking. Talia was beautiful with a great sense of style and a heightened sense of drama. They were waiting for me at my locker, which was decorated with streamers and pom-poms and candy. Part of the tradition on your sixteenth was taping up a picture of your car.

Zoe hugged me. “Finally, finally. Our baby is growing up.”

“Funny, Mom.”

This was a reference to me being the youngest in the class by a year, the result of a nursery school teacher who had declared me a genius and encouraged my parents to skip me a grade. Later they found out that she had bipolar disorder and she was sent away to recover, but I still carried the legacy of that chance encounter.

Talia got right to the point. “Is it a Beetle?”

“No, it's a charm bracelet.”

“What?”

I held up my wrist.

“Are those birds?”

“Yes, they are birds. You get to go to the bonus round.”

“But you're getting a car, too,” Zoe said.

“Nope.”

She had a white Honda and Talia had a blue Mini. They had given their cars names. The Honda was called Stephanie and the Mini was called Fernando. My Beetle was going to be D. J. Dynasty Handbag, after a character on
SNL.
D.J. for short.

“That is bizarre, truly,” Talia said, sinking her teeth into the drama. “There must be a reason. Some dark, twisted reason.”

“It's because he's not from here. Because he's from the South and he grew up poor and he didn't get a car: That's what he says. But I know it's because of my mother.”

“What about your mother?” Talia went wide-eyed. “You mean other than she's dead?”

“Yeah, I can't come up with anything bigger than that.”

“Oh, right, and she died in a car.”

In a bad car wreck. Everyone phrased it that way. “A bad car wreck, when Lynnie was little.” As if there were such a thing as a good car wreck. Exactly fifteen minutes after dropping me off at school on a Tuesday morning when I was in the third grade. Drunk driver. Bad drunk driver.

My father came to pick me up from school. I still remembered his face in the rectangular window outside my classroom. The teacher led me to the hall. My father knelt down to be at eye level with me. He said, “Lynnie, Mommy is gone.” It was that simple. And part of me still blamed him just because he was the one who said it. I remember going very still and thinking, Don't cry, don't show anything. Because if you show something it will be real, not just for you but for him. I started taking care of him right that moment.

And I hadn't stopped. I didn't know how to stop. Which was why I was wearing the stupid bird bracelet and why I hadn't cried or complained as much as I wanted to about the car. I had to let it go. He had been through enough and I was all he had.

How did I know this? I knew it because he didn't have a life outside of me. He just worked and came home. He never dated. Sometimes he still watched videos from when Mom was alive, and he always had a Scotch at night, but that could have been a lawyer thing.

But it honestly hadn't occurred to me until that very moment that he was trying to protect me from the same fate. How could I not have seen it? How could it have fallen on Talia's sense of tragedy to bring it into focus?

“Bad car wreck,” I said. I could feel the blood rushing to my face and I didn't know if I was mad or embarrassed or some emotion I couldn't identify.

“Eight years ago,” Zoe said quietly. I looked at her. It was the voice of reason coming out of the wilderness. “That was eight years ago. I mean, geez.”

“Way to be sensitive,” Talia said. “As if you ever get over a thing like that.”

Zoe shrugged. “But he lets you ride with other people.
He
drives a car.”

I shook my head. “That's different.”

The noises in the hall seemed very loud and I felt light-headed.

“Lynne, are you okay?” Zoe asked.

“Yeah, you look all white,” Talia said.

“Maybe I need air.”

“We're outside.”

“Maybe I need different air. I'll see you guys later. I have to get to homeroom,” I said. “Historyâ¦”

I walked away in a haze of understanding.