What Every Girl (except me) Knows (7 page)

“Hurry, get a paper towel,” Taylor whispered, and she ran into her room.

Chapter 13

By the time Mrs. Tyler came back, the milk was gone, the glasses were in the dishwasher, and Taylor was in a new pair of pants.

“So how was school?” Mrs. Tyler asked us both later, when we were in the kitchen eating dinner. I could tell she meant me, too, because she looked right at me when she asked.

“Good,” I answered.

“Taylor, did you get your vocabulary test back?”

“Mom, you know I did,” Taylor said, slipping her napkin onto her lap.

I did the same. Napkin in lap.

“You already looked in my binder,” Taylor continued. “You know I got an eighty-two.”

“You lost points on spelling,” Mrs. Tyler said between chewing. Mrs. Tyler ate more slowly than anyone I had ever seen, as if she didn’t really enjoy it. She set her fork down on the edge of her plate after almost every bite. I almost never put down my fork till I am done eating.

But I did then.

After we finished eating and had cleaned up, Mrs. Tyler announced we were having ice cream sundaes for our just-the-girls night. She put out two kinds of ice cream, vanilla and coffee, and three toppings—hot fudge, chocolate crunchies, and whipped cream. She made Taylor wait until I had made my sundae before she could eat hers. Maybe Mrs. Tyler was liking me a little more. Or maybe that’s just another thing girls have to do—wait till everyone is served before eating. Then Mrs. Tyler made herself one, too. A huge one. And we all dug in. Three girls eating lots of ice cream.

Mrs. Tyler turned to me. I got ready.

“Gabby, I read about your father in the paper this week,” she said. She smiled. She looked so much like Taylor, I could see, not just her hair. When she smiled, she had the same squinty-eyed smile.

“I read that he’s in the faculty art show,” Mrs. Tyler told me.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, but it was the first I had heard of it. It upset me that Mrs. Tyler knew more than I did about my father.

“The opening is in two weeks. Are you going?” she asked me.

As she spoke I had this clear image of standing before a painting, a single brush stroke across this huge canvas. It was a long time ago at a gallery opening. I was looking up at this enormous, empty painting, while my dad stood next to me and explained its place in postmodern history. It almost made sense to me the way he said it, and I stood for a moment taking it all in, trying to understand. I reached up to take my dad’s hand. But it wasn’t my dad! While I had been thinking, my dad had walked away and someone else was standing there. I was holding the hand of some total stranger.

I must have had that same lost look on my face; I wasn’t listening to what Mrs. Tyler had just said.

“Is the gallery open to the public, do you know?” Mrs. Tyler asked, and, by the way, she sounded as if she had tried more than one time.

“Oh, yeah. Anyone can go,” I said. “You should come.”

“Yes, I’d love to.” Mrs. Tyler took another scoop of ice cream and drizzled hot fudge all over it.

“Ice cream is my one weakness,” she said, licking the spoon.

I could believe that one. Mrs. Tyler didn’t seem to have many weaknesses.

Chapter 14

Taylor and I lay in bed that night, in the darkness, talking. Taylor’s bedroom (which I hadn’t gotten to see on my first visit) was perfect. It was symmetrical. Two twin beds, one on each side of the room, exactly the same distance from the walls; matching bedspreads that also matched the curtains; two white, warm rugs for our feet when we stepped out of bed; tightly tucked blankets to keep us under the covers like little pastries.

After dinner, after some more TV and a little time on the computer, Mrs. Tyler had told us to go to bed. No talking. It was late. We brushed our teeth, frothing our mouths full of toothpaste and making faces in the mirror.

Taylor used the toilet first while I waited in her room, carefully sitting on the bed, afraid to pull down the covers until I saw Taylor do it.

“Your turn,” Taylor said when she came into the room.

I got up and went into the bathroom. When I finished and came out, Taylor was hanging upside down. She was lying across the bed on her back and her head was nearly touching the floor, her hair spread out loosely like it was floating underwater.

“Look at this,” she called. She covered the top half of her head, her eyes and nose, with her hand. “Pretend this is right-side up and my chin is the top of my head.”

It took me a while to get what she was doing. Taylor kept talking, reciting the Gettysburg Address, exaggerating her mouth movements. Finally her face started to look like a long, bald head with no eyes and a crooked mouth. It looked so bizarre, then so real. If you looked at it long enough your mind adjusted to the optical illusion and made it appear a correct face, right-side up.

“You try it,” Taylor insisted.

We took turns hanging over the beds and making each other laugh. We did it at the same time, while the blood weighed down our heads and made us dizzy.

“You two better not still be awake!” Mrs. Tyler called out from somewhere in the house.

We quickly flipped back, and I dove under the covers. Taylor got up to shut out the light. She kept her door open just a little so that a shaft of light from the hall lay across her floor. I could hear a shower running from the bathroom in the master bedroom.

Taylor and I talked about school, about the other kids, about The Ones, and about Amber, who did finally come to school in new platform sneakers, not black but red.

Then the water shut off, and a few minutes later Mrs. Tyler appeared at the door. She wore a white terry cloth bathrobe, long to the floor. A white towel was turbaned on top of her head. She looked like a queen. (I silently noted to myself that I would have to add this to my list. I swore to myself that one day I would own a bathrobe like that.) She came into the room and sat at the end of Taylor’s bed.

“Try and get a good night’s sleep,” she told Taylor. She patted Taylor’s feet through the thick blankets.

“We will,” Taylor answered.

Mrs. Tyler kissed her daughter on the top of her head and then stood up. She paused in the doorway, backlit by the hall light, creating a tall, graceful silhouette.

“Good night, Taylor,” she called softly.

“Good night, Mommy,” Taylor said.

“Good night, Gabby.”

“Good night, Mrs. Tyler.”

And she left. Her footsteps padded away from our door.

I was seized with a pang of jealousy that I had never felt so strongly before. It wasn’t as much that Taylor said “Good night,
Mommy
” as what I had said: “Good night,
Mrs. Tyler
.”

Had I ever said “Good night, Mommy” to anyone?

It reminded me of my dream, the one I had about Taylor’s house. The mother’s voice calling out but not to me. In my dream I had been crying, but now, awake, I could not.

I lay quiet, but I didn’t fall asleep. Some time passed in the darkness. I heard Taylor crying softly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were sleeping,” Taylor said.

“No, I’m awake. What’s wrong?” I pushed myself up and crossed my legs.

“I miss my father,” Taylor confessed. She remained lying down, staring up at the ceiling while she spoke. “I know I always say how happy I am that my mom is happy and about Richard and everything…but I miss my dad so much.”

I tried to think of what I could say to comfort her. After all, I of all people, should be able to understand.

“I know it’s hard,” I said.

“I always miss him at night. He used to tell me stories before I went to bed.”

“My dad does that, too,” I said. As I thought of it, I started feeling homesick.

Taylor wasn’t really listening. It sounded like the first time she had thought these things. First time she said them out loud. They were meant more for her than for me.

“It’s harder for me, I think,” Taylor started slowly. “I mean, what happened to your mother…well, it happened so long ago. I still have to live with this all the time.” Taylor sniffed. “Every time I leave my dad’s apartment I feel terrible all over again. Every time.”

Taylor cried softly, but I didn’t try to say anything else. I lay back down in the bed and looked hard into the endless grayness where the ceiling would be if the light were on.

I felt so completely wronged, simply because there was nothing I could say to defend myself There were no words to describe my pain, because I wasn’t supposed to have any. What happened to my mother happened so long ago, it wasn’t supposed to matter anymore.

Hadn’t I spent my whole life proving that very point?

Chapter 15

Taylor had a tennis lesson first thing Saturday morning. I was grateful that Mrs. Tyler was dropping me off at my house early in order to get Taylor to the Field Club on time. I didn’t want Taylor to see that I was upset. My sadness had turned to anger and grown during the night. I didn’t know at who or for what, but I knew I couldn’t hide it long.

We woke up, dressed in a hurry, ate on the run, and the next thing I knew I was saying “Thank you for having me” and waving good-bye from my front lawn. Taylor and her mom drove off down my driveway.

I could hear Ian inside playing electric jazz. He was plugged in. I saw Cleo’s Volkswagen parked in front of the garage. So she had stayed over again.

Cleo used to leave very early in the morning, before she thought Ian and I were awake. Ian probably
was
sleeping, but I certainly was not. I used to hear Cleo’s noisy car starting up before the sun. But they didn’t bother hiding that anymore. My dad had never let that happen with anyone else.

I must have been standing still for a while, staring at nothing, before I felt how cold it was out there. I suddenly had this tremendous urge to tell Cleo what had happened. I wanted to tell her how my heart had clamped up last night when Taylor said her life was worse than mine. I wanted Cleo to explain my anger to me, to tell me I was justified in being so mad. I wanted something from Cleo. And though I wasn’t sure what, I was certain she could give it to me; as certain as I was that I couldn’t talk to my dad about it. It was all part of that stuff we never talk about, so we can pretend it never happened.

I opened the back door and was met by the warmth from the studio’s space heater, which was humming loudly.

“Hi, sweetie,” my dad said, still busy at his desk.

The extension arm of his clip-on lamp stretched as far as it could over his work space. There were no windows, since the studio was a sectioned-off part of the garage, which my dad had built when we first moved here, but an overhead light lit the whole room so he could work.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. “Where’s Cleo?”

I started past him toward the inner door to the house.

“She’s not here. A friend of hers picked her up. They went to look at some fabric warehouse,” he said. Then he looked up from the sketchbook he was drawing in. “Why?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, but I couldn’t believe the disappointment that was creeping up on me. I felt sick.

“Gabby?” My dad was looking at me now. He put down his piece of charcoal. He always made a sketch before he began work on his big paintings.

“What?” Anxiousness sounded in my voice, but my dad didn’t notice it.

“I’m glad you’re here, because I wanted to talk to you, anyway.” He coughed. Not just a little. My dad is a real throat-clearer. But I am used to it. I know he’s around when I hear it.

“What about?” I said. I wandered away from him, toward the easel.

Whatever this was, I didn’t want to hear it. My dad never used the words
I want to talk to you
.

I stuck my fingers in the little mounds of drying oil paints. The outer shell of oil paint hardens, but underneath is a treasure of wet color. It oozes out from the sides or any little hole you make in it.

When I was little, my dad used to set up a little easel for me right beside his. He used an oversized sketch pad propped up inside an old clothing rack. He taped the pad to the sides with duct tape. I could paint while he painted, and I wasn’t supposed to talk. But my paintings talked. Well, the fanned-out brush strokes that I made talked. They ran around the paper, chasing each other and getting into trouble. (Getting into trouble was a big explosion of oil paints all mixed together and swirled around till the paper almost ripped.)

Sometimes my dad took one of my paintings, framed it, and hung it in the house.

“Well, I’ve already tried talking to Ian.” My dad cleared his throat again.

This must be something bad.

It’s really the smell of my dad’s studio that I love. And it always stays the same—turpentine, oil paint, even the woven, natural smell of a brand-new canvas. It was like I was born into this, so when I walk in and smell the studio, I know I am home.

“I’m expecting more from you, Gabby,” my dad went on. “I’m hoping that…”

I turned away and walked toward a big painting my dad was working on. It was a scene from the farm just up the road. Two cows grazing in a flat field. Mostly the picture was the sky with huge, white clouds suspended in air.