“Why do you act this way?” my mother said.
“They are the ones where you eat the seeds,” I told her. Then I looked out the window. We were driving down Waterman Street and it was clogged with students from Brown University.
“And by the way,” I said, “were you even listening to me? I said if you didn’t let me go to Boston on the bus by myself then I would go and live with Daddy.” That queasy feeling came right back, as soon as I said those words.
My mother stopped the car, right there in the middle of Waterman Street. “Isn’t life strange?” she said.
The car behind us honked its horn, but she just sat there, shaking her head.
“You know I don’t like seeds,” Cody was crying. “Or skin on fruit. Or fuzzy fruit like kiwi and peaches.”
The car behind us squeezed past, and the driver swore at my mother.
“Have you ever heard of Persephone?” my mother asked me.
“Uh, no,” I said. I was starting to feel a little nervous. Also, I didn’t like not knowing something.
“Persephone was a Greek goddess and she got kidnapped by the god of the underworld. Her mother, whose name I can’t remember, was devastated, and eventually Zeus sent someone to rescue Persephone. But she ate these three pomegranate seeds and that forced her to return to the underworld every year for one month for each seed she ate. Three seeds. Three months. That’s winter.”
More cars were honking now.
My mother looked at me, satisfied. “That is an allegory for what is going on in this car, Madeline,” she said, and she started to drive again.
I wanted to ask her what an allegory was. In Humanities we had just covered onomatopoeia and similes, not allegories. But I knew what she’d say. Look it up.
Ever since my father married Ava and went on to have a real life, I have had to do a lot of thinking. In science, Mr. Renault calls that developing the power of observation: watching something and drawing conclusions from what you see. Like we watched snails for weeks in science class. You would be amazed what you can learn from watching a bunch of snails. I had the misfortune of being paired up with Michael Montana, who smells like a wet sweater even when he’s not wearing a sweater. His powers of observation, however, are incredible. He can tell snail poop from gravel in a nanosecond. I let him take the notes so that I could better my own powers of observation.
“Once you have developed your powers of observation here in the laboratory,” Mr. Renault told us, “you can use them anywhere in the outside world.” He seemed to be talking to me when he said, “Use them in your own habitat, for example.” The most important thing I observed about my own habitat was that my mother was not living a real life. She was all alone and wrote stuff that people read in doctors’ offices months late and only then out of boredom. She wrote things she didn’t even believe in herself. In essence, she lied.
Take that stupid article about strawberries and Easy-Make Jelly, Strawberry Shortcake, and a snack of Strawberries Dipped in Yogurt and Brown Sugar. It was true that she dragged us to a strawberry patch one blistering hot summer afternoon. Bees and mosquitoes buzzed all around us, annoying me and scaring Cody. We picked and picked, a boring few hours spent awkwardly bent over, getting dirt in our fingernails. Then we had to go home and eat so many strawberries and strawberry pies, cakes, waffles, and preserves that Cody broke out in hives and had to take oatmeal baths for a week.
But did the article mention any of that? Of course not. It talked about the joys of being outdoors picking stupid strawberries. It never mentioned the bees or the hot sun or any of the true things. In it, a phony family sits in a field somewhere surrounded by strawberries, every one of them grinning like a bunch of idiots. My mother works so hard at making up a life, she never spends time on the one she really has. I used to think her articles were kind of cute. Corny, but cute. That was when we were a happy family. Now I feel like we’re no different than the phony family in the pictures.
However, my powers of observation revealed that my father’s life really was like something out of a magazine. He had a beautiful wife who smelled like something exotic and romantic and took me to shops in the East Village to try on platform shoes and black miniskirts. He had a real career where he could write about true things that mattered to the world.
When I told my father that I was going to come and live with him if Mom didn’t let me take the bus to Boston like Mai Mai Fan, he said, “Madeline, I will convince your mother to let you take that bus. Don’t worry.”
“But if she says no, absolutely not, I can come and live with you, right?” I said.
“This may not be the most opportune time for that,” he said.
My stomach got that queasy feeling again. “You mean I can’t live with you?” I said.