After that first mention of Sylvie Bates-McAllister, Catherine would bring her up again and again. At a jewelry store at the mall, eyeing the displays: “I bet Sylvie Bates-McAllister buys diamonds like that and thinks nothing of it.” Passing by a stable: “Do you think Sylvie Bates-McAllister takes riding lessons there? Goodness, I’d love to learn how to jump; I should inquire about lessons.” When spotting a stretch limo paused at a traffic light next to them: “Perhaps Sylvie’s in there.” She would say, peering longingly into the tinted windows.
She started to spend like Sylvie Bates-McAllister, too. Every time Joanna’s father received the monthly credit card bill in the mail, her parents would have the same, tired argument. “This is where the money goes?” her father would boom to Catherine, who would be sitting at the kitchen table, doing her nails. “I just want things to be nice,” she’d holler back. “Is that too much to ask? I deserve this.” “If you want all this shit, get a job,” he’d say. To which Catherine would say that she absolutely would not get a job, no self-respecting Main Line woman had a job, at which Joanna’s father would stomp down to the basement, where he kept a weight bench and a few free barbells. Bruce Springsteen would start blaring, and Joanna would listen to the sound of metal against metal, the grunt of heavy weights being thrust over her father’s head. Catherine would put down her nail file and little bottle of polish, look at Joanna, and say, “This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.”
Nothing was ever right for Catherine. Nothing was ever good enough. When her health problems developed—episodes that made her writhe and faint and spend hours in the ER, begging to be examined—Joanna was certain it was because of her crippling dissatisfaction. It had metastasized through her body, Joanna figured, in precisely the same way her friend Chelsea’s mother’s breast tumor had metastasized to her lungs and liver. If one could die from cancer, then one could certainly die from unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.
For a long time, Joanna didn’t notice the looks the ER nurses gave one another when Catherine was wheeled in yet again. Nor did she question why her mother was never really given a diagnosis, or why she was never properly admitted to the hospital, or why her father only dropped the two of them off at the ER entrance, wanting nothing to do with them. She’d just assumed that her father was mean and insensitive, burdening Joanna with all the responsibility so he could spend more time lifting weights or tinkering with his Ham radio. On Joanna’s eleventh birthday, just as Joanna was welcoming the first of her friends to their house—she was having a sleepover party in the finished part of the basement—her mother got that pale, vague look again, and Joanna knew what was coming. Joanna hustled her friends downstairs, watching with trepidation as her mother yet again collected her things to go to the ER. “I can’t go with you this time,” Joanna said.
Catherine’s eyes widened. “Why?”
Joanna was suddenly near tears. “My friends are here,” she answered. And then, more indignantly: “It’s my birthday. Maybe Dad could go.”
Catherine looked terrified. “No! It has to be you!”