“Well?” my mother whispered as I gathered up my things. When I didn’t answer, she said, “Madeline? I’m dying here.” That made me smile.
I almost took her hand while we rushed down the long corridor and then the stairs that led us outside. But I didn’t want to be seen, a future ballerina with the junior company of the Boston Ballet, holding hands with my mother. So I just made a face that said: I think I got it! And in that instant, when her eyes lit up with something like pride, I almost loved her with the same intensity I used to before the divorce.
Once we got outside, though, and the car cost a zillion dollars to park in the garage and the traffic was thick and cars cut us off and honked their horns, I went back to being annoyed with her. I knew better than to distract her, even about this, when she was driving in Boston traffic.
So I put in my new favorite tape. Nuns singing Renaissance music.
“Do we have to listen to this now?” my mother said. She gripped the steering wheel hard enough that her knuckles got white and bony. “Can’t we listen to whoever kids are really listening to these days?”
“I like nuns,” I said. I wanted her to get us out of the traffic and concentrate on my audition even more, so I just listened to the nuns and thought about when we all lived in Boston and were happy. I thought about my Montessori School and how there were no grades and kids were put together by what they knew and what they liked. I was in the Ocean group. We read stories about the sea and kept a tank of saltwater tropical fish and learned about underwater life. Where were they now, the Ocean group? I wondered. I tried to remember their faces, the kid with the freckles, the kid from Germany, the boy who said he wanted to marry me. And my three friends with the beautiful flower names.
I sighed, homesick for our old life, the way we would cook spaghetti together and my father would make one of his super-duper salads and play opera and we would all sing together real loud. Sometimes I had dreams where I was in that apartment and someone was singing “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Carmen but it wasn’t my mother singing and it wasn’t my father; in fact, I couldn’t find either of them and I couldn’t find my way, either. I hated that dream.
“At last,” my mother said, relaxing. “Okay. Tell me about it. Every detail.”
But I wasn’t thinking about the audition anymore. Instead, I was thinking about the Calabros and how they’d invited me over for Easter breakfast. Bring your mother, they’d said.
“Want to go somewhere with me?” I said, surprising myself because the last thing I wanted was to share the Calabros with my mother. But thinking about our old life had made me forget for a minute how much I didn’t like her anymore.
“It depends,” she said.
“Can’t you just say yes? I mean it’s a thing I want you to do and right away you have to have all these conditions.”
“All right. I’ll do it. But can’t I even ask what it is?”
I was already sorry I’d invited her. I tried to think of a lie, to make up something like the school carnival or something. But that might be a sin. It was so hard to be Catholic.
“This is a mistake,” I said. Our life seemed to be gathering mistakes at a surprising speed.
“Come on,” my mother said.
“I have this new friend,” I said reluctantly. I saw it already, a new mistake coming. “Antoinetta.”
“Antoinetta?”
“Antoinetta,” I said, clenching my teeth. “And her family invited us for Easter breakfast.”
“All of us?”
I frowned. “Not your boyfriend. Us. Our family.”
“I was thinking of Cody,” my mother said gently.
I thought of all the kids that roamed around the Calabro house every Sunday, the little ones eating meatballs and the fat babies and then the middle ones, girls who chewed gum and braided one another’s hair and put on temporary tattoos.
“Cody can come,” I said.
“Should I call her mother and ask her what I can bring?”
“Her mother’s dead,” I said proudly.
“Well, isn’t that sad,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, but thinking about the Calabros, I didn’t feel sad at all. Instead, I felt part of something I hadn’t felt part of for a long time: a family.
Right away I saw it had been a mistake to bring my mother. For one thing, she wore a suit, the kind of thing she wore to meetings with editors. For another, she had brought asparagus with toasted sesame oil. I looked at her standing there in her business clothes, holding the pottery dish with the scrawny asparagus in it, and I wanted to disappear. Better yet, I wanted her to disappear.
But Mama Angie, Antoinetta’s grandmother, came over and took the dish. She smelled it, then said to my mother, “You’re Dutch, right?”
“No. No. I’m just American, I guess.”
“Indians?”
“I’m nothing,” my mother said, laughing.