When we pull into the driveway, I say good-bye and hop out. Kara doesn’t say a word. No amount of pity could turn her into a good sport. When she didn’t make varsity freshman year, she smashed her two-hundred-dollar V?lkl racket into the court, probably causing that crack she’s been bitching about all season. How was I ever friends with her?
Mrs. Anderson offers an insincere congratulations as I shut the car door. Her excessive mascara is smeared under one eye, so I know tears were shed over the loss. Real tears. From a grown woman. Over a tennis tournament. My mom was never that ridiculous. When I lost she’d sing that Sugarland chorus “Let go laughing,” then ask what I wanted for dinner. She could’ve picked sound tracks for movies—the woman had a song for every situation. Like when she belted out the Rolling Stones that time I sulked because she refused to buy me Tory Burch flats: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.” I never admitted it, but the unique delivery did make her point stick. I wonder what she’d sing now? Would she encourage leaving Wellesley or want me to stick it out for senior year? As if in response, that Cat Stevens song she loved floats to my mind: It’s not time to make a change.… I shiver, looking around the kitchen as if she could really be here, offering an opinion. The words echo through my head once more before I shake them free. Screw that. She’s the one who ditched me; changing wasn’t my call.
Dad isn’t home yet, thank God. I leave the admissions folder I’ve been carrying around for a week on the kitchen counter with a sticky note that reads: I want to be a boarder at Exeter next year. Need fresh start. Here’s the info. He’ll worry what people will think—first Mom bails, then me—but in the end he’ll agree. He has no energy to fight, and I know when he looks at me he sees her.
She died on Good Friday. She wasn’t religious but maybe it was symbolic, like her death was a sacrifice or something. Everyone at the funeral went on about how my mom was a giver, which means everyone at the funeral thought of Dad and me as takers. So that’s it. We were both taking and taking and taking, and my mother, like a keg after only a few hours at a crowded party, was tapped. Her nod and smile meant the same thing as my middle finger. I just didn’t know it. She certainly made her point. I imagine her looking down and shouting, “Do you see all I did for the two of you? Are you capable of being grateful yet?”
The struggle Dad and I have now is totally ironic. We’re so used to her caring for us that we have no idea how to care for each other. We play a reverse game of hide-and-seek where the goal is to never be caught in the same room. Do we not know what to talk about or is there really nothing to say? We discuss only necessities, and even then he seems limited to specific words: yes, no, maybe, when, where, why, who, okay.
Every three or four days he attempts a deep talk, usually after he’s had a few. Last night he asked if I knew “all about sex.” I said it was a determination of whether you’re male or female and laughed. His eyes watered. I felt bad, so I told him not to worry about it, that I was “all set in that department.” When I realized how much I sounded like Mom, I started crying too. We both ditched the living room in opposite directions.
The truth is, I’ve been sleeping with John since my sixteenth birthday. I wish I’d told my mom while I had the chance, but I overheard her on the phone with Aunt Meg the night my cousin Lucy announced she was planning to do it with Keith: “It’s so special she told you. I hope Eve trusts me when it’s time.” I knew instantly what she was talking about. “Make sure Lucy’s smart about it, so you aren’t a grandma at forty.” There was a pause while my aunt spoke. “Well, I’ll certainly keep you posted, but I don’t think Eve is ready yet. Lucy has it right; seventeen is a respectable age to take the plunge. Not too old, not too young.” I play the conversation over and over in my mind. I did trust and respect my mom, but I figured there was no harm waiting until I was the same respectable age as Lucy to tell her, which will be next month.
I was always deliberate like that. I got my first period when I was only eleven, not even in middle school yet. I calmly grabbed a quarter from the bottom of my backpack, snuck into the teachers’ bathroom to buy a pad from the machine that we hid notes under between classes, and went on with my day. When I got home and told my mom she looked alarmed. “You could’ve called,” she said. “I would’ve picked you up so we could talk about it.”
“We already talked about it.”
“I mean about the details of what to do.”
“What details?” I asked, genuinely concerned I’d missed something. “Blood comes out and something needs to be there to catch it, right?”
“Huh, well, yes, but your independence does scare me sometimes. I hope you know I’m here if you need me.”
“I do,” I said. “That’s why I can be independent.”
She smiled. She had the best smile.
Technically I’m more independent than ever since there’s literally no one looking after me, but independence isn’t liberating when it’s involuntary. I’ve been discarded like day-old milk. Even if I accept there’s a lifetime ahead, I cannot picture how I’ll live it without her. No Christmas cards will be sent, the vegetable garden will die, our sheets will have visible dirt before Dad or I think to change them, and we won’t do anything to celebrate my birthday this year. Which is fine by me.
Brady
My wife is dead. She jumped off a fucking building. I could watch the movie a thousand more times and still be shocked by the ending.
At the funeral her sister Meg kept throwing out possibilities like closet depression or a hidden trauma, but it’s all bullshit. Maddy wasn’t a secret-keeper. She couldn’t tell a lie, even when it was the socially acceptable thing to do. A friend once hounded her for details on childbirth. She endeavored to avoid the question, advising that you don’t think about the experience once that precious baby is in your arms, but the lady wouldn’t relent. “You’re sure you want the truth?” Maddy asked. The lady nodded. “Labor is like shitting a watermelon while getting felt up by your mailman. And when it’s all over, you still look pregnant.” The woman blanched. With Maddy, it was ask and you shall receive.