“Nothing bad is going to happen to us. I promise.” Nurse translation: We’ll probably have to amputate that leg.
I kept making designs in the tea leaves. The hotel room door opened and Dad came in and Mom shut both doors to the bathroom and left me in there alone. I heard them talking low to each other. I remember hoping that I didn’t get Bruce in trouble. But I somehow knew I’d gotten Bruce in trouble.
Eleanor Rigby II
After my choking episode, we’re all relatively quiet as we eat. Ten-year-old Sarah isn’t her usual happy, talkative self. I find that weird because she can leave anytime she wants and there’s no reason to be careful. She looks up at Dad a few times, and he just eats his food like he’s a food-eating machine and doesn’t say anything. We finish our tacos. Mom rinses dishes and I put them in the dishwasher. Ten-year-old Sarah is in the study looking at her painting above the piano. She asks Dad, “Do you mind if I play?”
Dad says, “Please do!”
She plays a rusty early version of “Eleanor Rigby.” Mom and I come in to see if Dad will recognize her. He doesn’t.
With Vigor
When ten-year-old Sarah goes home—wherever home is—Mom and I are left in the living room alone.
“If Bruce came to Philly right now, would you let him come over?” I ask.
She looks at me with a very dubious face.
“Hypothetically,” I add.
“Of course!” she says. With the exclamation point. With vigor.
“I know his phone number,” I say. “I’ve been meaning to call him.”
Mom starts plumping pillows. This is probably the first time I have ever seen her plumping pillows. “That would be great!” she says.
I decide not to say anything else. I decide that if Mom didn’t work at the hospital four nights a week, she’d probably become a crazy pillow-plumping lady.
It’s when she sits on the couch, hugs a pillow that she’s just plumped, and starts to cry that I decide to say more.
“Are you okay?”
She says, “They say the number one rule of parenting is to never let your children see you cry.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t know. Everyone.”
I grab the box of tissues from the side table and put it next to Mom’s leg. “So why are you crying?”
This makes her cry more.
“If it’s because I brought up Bruce, I’m sorry,” I say.
“No, no. It wasn’t that. It’s not your fault.” She blows her nose. “It’s just—everything.”
Here’s what I’m deciding. I’m deciding that Mom is crying because of Dad being restructured. She’s crying about Bruce, even if she denies it. And she’s crying about ten-year-old Sarah because she saw how little ten-year-old Sarah had to say at dinner. Ten-year-old Sarah has only been home from Mexico for a month. I think that’s why Mom is crying.
That is Mom’s everything.
She shoos me upstairs with her free hand. The other hand is hiding her face.
I tell her I love her.
This makes her cry more, so I go upstairs. There is a text on my phone from Bruce. My flight lands at 4:15 pm in PHL tomorrow. Dinner?
Tiffany
Mom and I go shopping. At least it’s not a museum. We go to the underground mall in Center City, and on the walk there, I see two other Sarahs but I don’t point them out.
In the misses’ area of one department store, forty-year-old Sarah shows up. Her hair is perky and shorter. I say, “Hi, Sarah.”
She says, “Hey there,” and does the circular fun wave. “You still haven’t told them, have you?”
I am talking to myself in twenty-four years. I’m ignoring her question. I look her up and down, and she smiles and tousles my hair with her hand. “You’re a lot cooler than twenty-three-year-old Sarah,” I say.
“Ya think?”
“She thinks she’s better than me. And everyone. But especially me.”
“The twenties are complicated,” she answers.
“She thinks I’m stupid.”
“But she’s you. Think about that for a minute.”
She walks through the racks and picks out clothing and drapes it over her arm. She stops periodically to look at me, then grabs more items. I have no idea what she plans to do with the clothing until she hands them all to me and points to the dressing room.
“How are you with bras?” Mom asks me through the dressing room door.
“I hate them.”
“Necessary evil,” she says.
The clothes forty-year-old Sarah picked out for me are cool, but not me. I think of Alleged Earl. I wonder when he went shopping last. I wonder when he wore a new shirt last. I think it was probably a while ago.
Thinking of Alleged Earl makes me feel like a coward. I sit on the little bench in the dressing room and I think about the day in the café across from 30th Street Station and how I could have met him. When I walked out of the café, I’d have felt stronger or prouder or like I’d done the right thing.