Silence. Silence for so long that I had to check to make sure we were all still connected. We were. New York City in summer, I knew, was hot and humid and the subway smelled like pee. But I didn’t care. When you are part of a family, things like that don’t really matter. Just when I started imagining it, how I could forget about my mother and Cody and disappear into my father’s family, into New York City, my father spoke. His voice cutting into my daydream startled me so much, I almost screamed.
“This is an ongoing dialogue,” he said. “The trip, the details, all of it.”
“We leave June twentieth,” my mother said, and let the date sit there between them, stretching across Connecticut right into my father’s loft in Tribeca. She waited, then said in a dewy voice, a voice I’d come to hate because it was supposed to make everybody pity her, “I guess that date doesn’t mean a thing to you anymore.”
June twentieth would have been their fifteenth wedding anniversary. I still remembered that date, so I knew he had to remember it, too, the way my mother would get all dressed up fancy and spray on too much Chanel Number 5. She’d wear lipstick, too, and mascara. Ava Pomme wore those things all the time, but my mother never did. Except on their anniversary. She’d let me take a pair of new stockings out of the funny silver plastic egg they came in and unroll them for her. We’d wait by the door for my father to come in and act like he’d forgotten. “Oh,” he’d say, “is dinner formal tonight?” Until finally he’d produce a dozen long-stem roses and they would kiss all romantic like two people in love.
My throat started to get funny. It’s weird when your parents aren’t in love anymore. It doesn’t make sense. “It’s complicated,” both of them say whenever I ask them about this. For my whole life, until the divorce, almost nothing was complicated. Now everything was.
“Does it mean anything, Scott?” Mom asked, her voice all soft.
Some teeny part of me thought that maybe that question would change everything. Of course Dad remembered that he was the guy in that wedding picture with Mom, the one with the goofy grin on his face and the slightly crooked bow tie. He was the one who wrote their wedding vows and had them printed all fancy and framed. He was the one who hung those vows in their bedroom, right above their bed.
I wanted to yell into the phone, “Of course you remember, Dad!”
But instead, I turned off the speakerphone. I didn’t want to hear his answer. In some ways, even though I hated to admit it, my mother and I were actually a lot alike.
Chapter Three
AVA POMME, THE TART LADY
“When people die,” Cody said, “they disappear.”
Our mother concentrated on her own reflection in the mirror, putting on a color of lipstick called Walnut Stain. It sounded like something you used on a piece of furniture getting refinished. She’d dragged us to Nordstrom earlier, where we had to watch her wander around in the makeup department like a zombie. She did fine at the local supermarket. But put her in a place where they sold something other than food and she couldn’t handle it.
“But when they faint,” Cody continued, “they only half disappear.”
“Not exactly,” she said.
She put her finger in her mouth, puckered her lips, then pulled her finger out of the tight O of her mouth. This is how you kept lipstick from getting on your teeth, she had explained to me after the woman at Nordstrom had explained it to her. I filed that away for future use.
As if he hadn’t heard her, Cody said, “But what happens when a person gets divorced? They’re not exactly disappeared, but you can’t exactly see them, either.”
“Don’t stand on the tub,” she said, frowning.
“When a person gets divorced,” Cody said, “do they get like sort of frozen?”
Our mother turned around and lifted him off the edge of the tub, where he stood gripping the shower curtain, an old plastic thing covered with black-and-white images of movie stars from the 1940s. Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. Our father had picked it out. We used to watch Classic Theater every Friday night on Channel 36. This was before Cody was born. The three of us used to scrunch together on our old sofa, the one the color of eggplants, and share a bowl of popcorn that Dad had made on the stove, not in the microwave, with freshly grated parmesan cheese on top. He could name any movie and who starred in it without even thinking very hard. On the other hand, our mother always got Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio mixed up. Never mind old movie stars.
“Tomorrow we’re getting a new shower curtain,” she mumbled, more to herself than to Cody, who now stood before her, gazing up into her face.
“No!” he said, horrified. “I love this one! It has all these people’s faces on it. This lady and this guy,” he added, jabbing at Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. Poor Cody! By the time he was old enough to watch old black-and-white movies with us, there was no more us.
She kneeled down in front of Cody.