With her hair like that and her eyes bulging the way they did when she got mad, she looked crazy. So crazy that I laughed.
And as soon as I laughed, she started to cry.
“This is dysfunctional,” I said. “I will be in therapy for the rest of my life!” Carolyn MacNamara from school went to therapy every Wednesday. She had dark circles under her eyes, pointy bones, and divorced parents.
I decided to stay in my room all night and write another letter to the Pope about my sainthood. Certainly someone who would put up with all of this all the time—a mother who wanted her hair to stand up like she’d been electrocuted, who laughed and cried without any reason, who shouted at her daughter—certainly all of these things would help my cause.
I was writing the letter when my father called. Of course, I listened in.
“It’s fine, Alice,” he was saying. “Take them to Italy.”
“What?” Mom said.
“That’s right,” Dad said, “because I worked on getting an assignment in Rome and the Times just gave me the okay. This way I’ll be there, too, and I can see my kids.”
“Fine!” Mom said. “If you have to one-up me every single time—”
“Don’t get paranoid,” Dad said.
I hung up quick. They were about to have a big fight and I didn’t want to hear. Besides, I was happy. Dad was going to be in Rome this summer. Italy was looking better and better.
One of the things my mother hated most about the divorce was putting us on that train to New York City once a month. She hated the way I always dressed in black for the trip to New York, how I pretended I actually lived in Manhattan and was on my way home instead of away from home. She hated the way that Cody always pressed his face to the window, distorting his features so that he appeared like something floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Until that phone rang five or six hours later, she was all nerves and jumpiness. I knew all this because she always told me, every single time.
But this time we were all boarding the train together. Cody and I were off to visit our father and Mom was on her way to a meeting and dinner with her editor, Jessica. She wore black, too: the pants she called Katherine Hepburn pants and a cashmere sweater, the one thing she’d splurged on for herself with her cookbook royalties. Her college roommate Melissa had told her that a girl needed something cashmere, the bigger the better. “Melissa knows these things,” my mother told me. “That’s dumb advice,” I said, just to be contrary.
She had on her Walnut Stain lipstick and she’d waxed her hair again. I decided to sit alone.
“You can sit alone only if I can see you,” my mother said.
So I took the seat in front of my mother and Cody.
“Isn’t this fun?” I heard her ask Cody. He was going to practice writing his numbers. He always made his 3s and 6s backward, but very neat.
“It is, Mommy,” he said. “I’m so glad you came with us. When you don’t come, Madeline won’t even talk to me. She just listens to her iPod and eats all the snacks.”
I rolled my eyes, even though they couldn’t see me. For one thing, I only had an old Shuffle to listen to. Everyone on the planet had iPods that played videos but I had this ancient thing. Also, I had no cell phone. Saints shouldn’t be so materialistic, I guess, but Bernadette didn’t have to keep up with technology.
“This time we’ll eat all the snacks,” my mother said, like that would bother me.
“Go ahead,” I said, sticking my face against the crack between the seats. “I hate those stupid rice cakes you always pack and I hate that bread with the cream cheese.”
“Good,” my mother said, leaning toward the crack. I could smell her coffee breath. “You can go to the diner car and get whatever it is you do like.”
“I want an Am on Rye,” I said. When she didn’t laugh, I said, “Get it? Am instead of ham because we’re on Amtrak. And Rye because we go through Rye, New York.”
“The pun,” she said, “is the lowest form of humor.”
She opened her book then. It was a mystery, set in England, her favorite thing to read. She always liked trying to solve the murder, and the foreign setting, which somehow made everything even more ominous and seemingly impossible to solve. She always used to tell me the plots of these novels and together we would try to figure out who the bad guy was. But lately, I’d lost interest.
“Want to know the setup?” she asked.
Even though a little part of me wanted to say yes, I leaned back in my seat and said, “No, thanks.”
“It’s a good one,” she said.
I looked out the window at all the trees whizzing by. “I’m not in the mood,” I said finally.
Her seat seemed to sigh as she settled herself into it for the four-hour ride to New York City and Dad.