Kitabı oku: «All The Things We Didn’t Say», sayfa 2

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The night after Claire came over, my father declared we had nothing to eat in the house, which wasn’t an exaggeration. We hadn’t gotten the hang of shopping for ourselves yet. But now that we were on our own, we could go out to dinner wherever we wanted, which usually meant Grimaldi’s.

Grimaldi’s was this pizza place down under the Brooklyn Bridge. The pizza was so good that people lined up on the streets for a table. My mother hated eating there because the tablecloths were checkerboard, there were too many children, and they only served pizza for dinner. She hated that all the tables had wobbly legs, and that the wine specials were on a little card-stand next to a pot of fake flowers. As my father, brother, and I piled into the little dining room, I tried to see Grimaldi’s imperfections through her eyes; I scoffed at the place’s paltry selection of sodas, offering Pepsi instead of Coke. I sneered at the paper napkins. That awkward autumn when Claire was pretending she was still my friend, she came here with my family. Just as we were sitting down in a booth, Claire spotted some of the girls from the bus across the room, sans parents, sharing a basket of mozzarella sticks. Claire waved at them enthusiastically, but I shrank down in my seat. ‘Why aren’t you waving?’ my mother hissed. I shrugged; Claire pretended not to hear. Later, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. ‘Summer should have more girlfriends,’ my mother said in a low voice. ‘Does it matter?’ my father answered. My mother murmured something I couldn’t hear.

I caught a glimpse of Claire this morning in the courtyard at school, just as I was dashing outside to the breakfast cart to get coffees for the popular girls in my first-period French class. Claire was talking to Melissa Green, one of her old friends. Melissa had a frozen, terrified smile on her face, trying to focus only on Claire’s eyes and not the rest of her body. When Claire said goodbye and turned away, Melissa’s expression twisted. She ran back to a gaggle of waiting girls and they started whispering.

‘So what do you think Mom’s doing right now?’ I asked my father as our Grimaldi’s waitress took our order and trudged away.

‘I don’t know, honey,’ my father said wearily.

‘You should try and call her,’ I suggested.

‘She’ll call when she’s ready.’

‘Mom probably wants you to call,’ I said. ‘She could be surrounded by younger guys, wherever she is. She could get tempted, just like Mrs Ryan was tempted by that younger French man.’

My father set down his fork. Even Steven, who had been poring over advanced calculus problem sets-he was a freshman at New York University, but lived in our apartment instead of the dorms-looked up with mild interest. ‘Excuse me?’ my father sputtered.

I repeated what I’d heard from the girls in French class. ‘She had an affair with a younger Frenchman from their local boulangerie. Claire caught them. And that’s why she’s so fat: she ate to console herself. It makes perfect sense.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ My father looked aghast. ‘And Claire’s not fat. She looks fine.’

‘Fine?’ I echoed. ‘Fine?’

He sighed wearily and excused himself to the bathroom, squeezing down the narrow hall next to the brick oven, which was covered almost entirely with black-and-white snapshots of scowling old women in aprons. My mother once remarked that it was disgusting how many people in New York City-in the whole of America, really-were getting so fat. My father retorted that obesity sometimes wasn’t someone’s fault. What about genetics? What about depression? And my mother sighed and said, ‘Honestly, Richard, what would you do without me? You can’t go telling Summer being fat is okay!’

I wanted to call my mother right now and tell her that I would never, ever believe being fat was okay. And if only she’d seen me doling out coffees to the French class girls in the courtyard this morning-there were such grateful smiles on their faces, and we’d all walked to French class together in a happy, laughing clump. She could’ve dropped by the school; other parents did it all the time. That’s my daughter, she would’ve thought, if she’d have seen me. And maybe her mind would’ve changed about us-about everything-just like that.

When I came home from school the next day, my brother was sitting at the kitchen table. He was always parked at the table doing math, even though he could’ve used NYU’s facilities instead. His glasses made his eyes look enormous.

‘Did anyone call?’ I asked.

‘Nope.’ He didn’t raise his head.

My smile drooped a little. I continued to stare at Steven until he finally looked up. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then go somewhere else!’ Steven had my mother’s angular face, but we both shared my dad’s oversized nose. When we were little-when Steven and I were sort of friends-we started a secret club called The Schnoz. Our father mystified us both back then, with his brilliant white lab coat and all his tics-the specific pastries for breakfast, the long runs often at night, the dark, dreary moods that would come over him like a thick wool blanket. We decided that he was secretly a superhero, a mix between a mad scientist and a stealthy GI Joe-Steven was obsessed with the military. Our club mostly consisted of spying on my father while he watched television in the den, looking for superhero clues. But then, Steven turned ten and announced that if he didn’t win a Nobel Prize by the age of 20, he was going to enlist in the Special Forces. My father laughed and reminded Steven how clumsy he was-he’d probably shoot himself in the hand while trying to clean his gun. The Schnoz disbanded pretty much after that.

When he got older, Steven went to Stuyvesant High, the smart math and science school in the city. My mother didn’t ask if I wanted to take the test to go to Stuyvesant. My parents had a huge argument about it-my father said Stuyvesant was the best place for me, but my mother insisted that Peninsula was better because it encouraged the liberal arts. ‘But she’s not interested in liberal arts!’ my father bellowed. ‘She likes science! She won three elementary and middle school science fairs at St Martha’s!’ My mother rolled her eyes. ‘We should let Summer choose for herself,’ my father bargained. ‘She’s going to Peninsula,’ my mother said. ‘End of story.’

Even though my father was right-I wasn’t that into art or history or English-I liked Peninsula fine. And anyway, girls who went to Stuyvesant were nerds who never got boyfriends. Everyone knew that.

‘Do you want a soda?’ I asked Steven, turning for the fridge.

‘No.’

‘We still have the orange stuff Mom bought for you.’

‘Mmm.’ His pencil made soft scratching sounds against the paper.

‘It looks like you’re running out, though. But Mom will probably be back in time to buy a new case.’

He kept writing. Steven had hardly said a word about her since she’d left, so I didn’t know what I thought I was going to achieve, fishing. Steven had hardly spoken to her anyway, except to ask if she could wash a load of his whites. He probably didn’t even care that she was gone. Although, was that possible? Yes, she and Steven were very different-she was so glamorous-but Steven had to have some thoughts about it. Just one teensy feeling, somewhere.

‘Summer, there you are.’ My father appeared in the doorway. ‘I have a favor to ask you.’

He led me to the living room, and we sat down on the couch. ‘Mrs Ryan just called. She wanted to know if I could tutor Claire in biology.’

I stiffened, surprised. I’d looked for Claire at school today but hadn’t seen her anywhere. ‘You said no, right?’

‘I said I was too busy.’

I tried not to laugh. Lately, my father’s version of busy was piling magazines for recycling and watching the home shopping channels-he liked the old people that called in. He probably hadn’t even gone to the lab all week.

My father picked up one of the little plastic figurines from the toy ski slope he’d bought on a trip to Switzerland. It came with four little Swiss skiers, each with a blanked-out, stoic Swiss expression. Steven had been obsessed with the ski slope when my parents brought it home, but it had become more of a Christmas decoration. Last night, on the walk home from dinner, there were suddenly fairy lights on our neighbors’ banisters and Christmas trees in their front windows. It made our naked, untended-to tree in the living room seem so obviously neglected, so I went down to our basement storage space, found the Christmas box, and brought everything up myself-the ornaments, the Santa knick-knacks, the ski slope, even old holiday photos of all of us unwrapping Christmas gifts, my father inevitably wearing a gift-wrap bow on the top of his head. The stuff wasn’t that heavy. And it was sort of fun to decorate on my own.

‘Perhaps you’d like to tutor Claire instead,’ my father suggested.

I shook my head. ‘I’m kind of busy, too.’

He rubbed his hand over his smooth chin. ‘Busy with what?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Well, I’ve already set it up,’ he breezed on. ‘She’s coming over in ten minutes.’

‘Dad.’

He placed the plastic skier at the top of the hill and let go. The skier zipped down. My father caught him at the bottom, tweezed his little plastic head between his thumb and pointer finger, and guided him back up the side of the slope, simulating a chairlift. He made a brrr sound with his lips, impersonating a motor.

When I was down in the basement getting all the ornaments and stuff, an invitation fluttered out from a box. It was for a Christmas party at Claire’s house from that first year I’d attended Peninsula. The night of the party, my mother asked why I wasn’t getting ready. When I said I’d rather watch the Christmas marathon on TV-they were playing Rudolph, Frosty, and The Year Without a Santa Claus back-to-back, a stellar lineup-my mother blew her bangs off her face. ‘It’s not a crime Claire has other friends,’ she chided. ‘It wouldn’t kill you to be friends with them, too.’

As if it had been my decision. As if I’d orchestrated things that way.

The doorbell rang. Mrs Ryan stood in the hall. ‘Claire’s down at the deli,’ she said, walking right in. ‘Thank you so much for doing this, sweetie. It’s a huge help.’

I grumbled tonelessly.

‘Is your dad home?’ She looked around. ‘He invited me over for coffee, but I wasn’t sure if he was mixed up, since it’s so early. I didn’t think he’d be back from work yet.’

I felt a flush of embarrassment. ‘He had a half-day.’

Mrs Ryan walked into the foyer, smiling at our family pictures on the wall, many of them over ten years old. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a disposable camera. It was covered in green paper, and there was a picture of a woman and a little kid, probably meant to be her daughter, sitting on the edge of a motorboat, smiling so blissfully that their teeth gleamed blue-white. ‘Fun Saver’, the camera was called.

I pointed at it. ‘My mother uses those, too. But she also has a Nikon. That’s probably what she’s using for her trip.’

Mrs Ryan advanced the camera slowly. ‘How are you holding up, Summer?’

‘I’m great. Really excited for Christmas.’

‘Your mother…’ Mrs Ryan shook her head. ‘It’s so unexpected. I mean, I just talked to her a month or so ago. She gave no indication…’

I stared her down. ‘She’s on a trip. No big deal.’

Mrs Ryan blinked hard, as if she’d just run smack into a wall without noticing it was there.

‘I mean, it’s not even worth talking about,’ I went on. ‘Like, not to Claire or anything. She probably has enough on her mind anyway, right?’

Mrs Ryan shifted her weight. Then, she peered into the hall. ‘Oh. Here we are, honey.’ She gestured Claire inside.

Claire wore a heavy blue polo shirt and a long black crinkle skirt. The elastic band stretched hard against her waist. There was a blossom of acne around her mouth. Before she left, Claire’s skin was clear and glowing. Maybe France poisoned her.

‘How about I get a picture of you two?’ Mrs Ryan suggested, holding the Fun Saver to her face. ‘The friends reunited.’

Claire rolled her eyes. ‘God, Mom. No.’

‘Come on. Just one. Stand together.’

There was a frozen beat. Finally, I took a step to Claire. We used to pose for pictures with our arms thrown around each other, our tongues stuck out. Now, it felt like the corners of my mouth were being held down by lead weights. Claire gave off a heated radiance, as if shame had a temperature. There was a fluttering sound. When the flash went off, bright, burnt spots appeared in front of my eyes.

‘Beautiful.’ Mrs Ryan advanced the film and placed the camera on the little table in the hall. Claire and I shot apart fast.

My father emerged, saying, ‘Hi Liz’, and that he’d put a pot of coffee on. The adults migrated toward the kitchen. Suddenly, I didn’t want my father hanging around Mrs Ryan. Sometimes he gave up too much of himself. And Mrs Ryan was tainted with marital strife. Some of it might somehow rub off on him, like a grass stain.

Claire disappeared down the hall to the bathroom, but I stayed where I was, glowering at the Fun Saver on the hall table. I wanted to tear off the wrapping and rip it into thousands of pieces. I slid the camera into my pocket. If Mrs Ryan asked, I would tell her I had no idea where it went.

I found Claire standing in my bedroom doorway. Her eyes swept over the piles of clothes in the corner and the holiday trees and singing Santa Clauses on my dresser-I had Christmasized my room as well. ‘I forgot how big your room was,’ she said after a pause. ‘My room on Avenue A is so small. And my room in Paris was even smaller.’

There was a flowered bra on the floor, the kind that hooked in the front. I noticed a gray flannel nightgown, too, the one with the kitten silk-screened across the chest. A speech bubble above the kitten said, ‘I love to sleep’. I stood on top of it.

‘So,’ I muttered. ‘Biology?’

Claire shrugged. ‘Sure, if you want.’

‘So what’s the deal? Didn’t you take it last year?’

‘Yeah. But I totally sucked at it.’

But you used to be so good at everything, I wanted to say.

I looked around my room and realized there was nowhere for us both to sit. This probably would’ve made more sense at the kitchen table. Finally, I pulled my chair over to the bed, and Claire sat down. I plopped on the bed, pulled my biology book out of my bag, and opened it. ‘How far behind are you?’

‘I got lost around cells and genetics.’ Claire sat very upright in the chair, her hands folded in her lap.

‘Because it was in French?’ I asked.

‘No.’

Because you’re fat? I pictured fat clogging up her brain, impairing her memory.

I flipped to the start of the genetics chapter. Claire leaned over and tapped a drawing of a tightly wound coil of DNA. ‘I heard a Peninsula sub freaked out about genetics on Monday.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Kind of. I was in the class.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was this guy, Mr Rice. He was subbing for Mrs Hewes -she’s on maternity leave. He told us that DNA is magnetic. We’re stuck with our parents, and they’re stuck with us, whether we like it or not. DNA can explain everything we do, except we’re too stupid to understand that yet. Only the aliens can understand it.’

‘Aliens?’ Claire giggled. ‘Even my teachers in France weren’t that messed up.’

‘He didn’t seem messed up, really.’ I clutched a pillow close to my chest, curling away from Claire. ‘Maybe our school is just being narrow-minded.’

Claire stared at me. ‘You believe him?’

‘I just think it’s an interesting theory. I don’t believe the part about the aliens.’

She shifted positions, moving closer. ‘So why do you think it’s interesting?’ Her tone of voice was curious but delicate. It was the same voice she’d used when we were friends, as if I were the most fascinating person in the world.

After a thoughtful moment, Claire added, ‘Is it because you like the idea of everything happening for a reason? Or that, if you looked hard enough, you’d be able to understand why people do the stuff that they do? Like why they go away without telling you where they’re going?’

If she said one more thing, I would punch her puffy face. I would point out that she wasn’t one to talk-she’d found her mother fooling around with that young Frenchman, after all. I pictured Claire throwing open the double doors to her parents’ bedroom, seeing Mrs Ryan and the boulangerie baker tangled in bed together, the sheets on the floor. The baker was wearing a black beret and nothing else. The soles of his bare feet were dirty, and so were his hands.

Claire pressed her lips together coyly. Even in her current state, she could be her old self with me-the one who always said, It’s okay. You can tell me. I’ll still like you. But she didn’t like me in the end, did she? She didn’t let me into her world; there was something horribly wrong with me. Maybe it was an obvious thing, something a lot of people saw.

Still, I thought about the thing bumping around inside of me. The thing I was afraid to admit, even to myself. Part of me wanted to tell her. Part of me needed someone to tell.

‘Do you remember when we used to roll down the hill in the park?’ Claire asked quietly.

I bit my lip hard, startled. ‘We used to have races.’

‘Rolling races.’ Claire made a small smile. ‘That was fun.’

‘And we used to play a lot of Monopoly,’ I said, as if just recalling.

‘You were always the guy on the horse.’

‘And you were always the shoe.’

‘And I used to tickle you.’ Claire giggled.

‘I hated that.’

‘C’mon. It was so much fun.’ Claire looked thoughtful, then wily, almost like she was considering tickling me right then. She moved toward me. In anticipation, I moved back on the bed and jerked my foot away quickly, sideswiping the softness of her stomach. It felt substantial and…mushy.

Claire jumped back and crossed her arms over the spot on her stomach that I’d kicked. I tucked my foot underneath the bed skirt. ‘Sorry.’

‘I was just getting my highlighter,’ Claire mumbled. It had fallen on the floor; she reached down for it. At that moment, the holiday tree came on. It was on a timer, playing a different Christmas song every fifteen minutes. This time, it was Perry Como singing ‘Mistletoe and Holly’. Claire and I both jumped.

The mood changed fast, from light to awkward. Claire sat back down and we went through the rest of the biology chapter on genetics and then I took her through cells. She got it right away, which made me wonder if she’d really failed biology at all. I duly explained mitochondria, the nucleus and vacuoles, evolution and natural selection, the chemical composition of proteins and carbohydrates. I left out fats on purpose. Claire pretended not to notice.

When my father was young, he was in a car accident. He and his friends were driving home from a party, and they were going down a twisty road and hit a deer. This was when my father lived in western Pennsylvania.

It felt like a story I’d learned in history class, repeated again and again each year. My father’s friend’s name was Mark, and Mark’s girlfriend’s name was Kay. Kay was sitting in the front passenger seat. The car crashed in such a way that her side was crumpled, but Mark and my father were unharmed. My father got out of the car and saw the deer, dead and bloody on the ground. Then he ran over to Kay’s side and took one look at her and passed out. He woke up later in the hospital. Kay was in a coma. Later, she died.

My father brought it up at the oddest of times. The last time he talked about it, we were walking into the Village Vanguard jazz club-I was the only one in the family who would go there with him. ‘I basically saw the girlfriend of my best friend die,’ he whispered, just as an older black man hobbled onstage to the piano. ‘Sometimes I think about how different my life would have been if that accident hadn’t happened.’

Different how? He wouldn’t have gone to Penn State or met my mother? He had been a senior, and my mother had been a freshman. They’d met in line at one of the university’s dining halls. But my mother paid my father no attention. Even though he was handsome, he had a strange accent. He was from a part of Pennsylvania that people from the Philadelphia area shunned.

My father won my mother over with persistence. There were gaps in the story; next, it jumped to the part about my mom getting pregnant with Steven. My father was in med school by then. He’d gotten an offer to intern at the NYU Downtown Hospital. My mother, who was fascinated with New York, dropped out of her sophomore year of college, moved to New York with my father, and had Steven.

I once asked my mom if she and dad would’ve been friends in high school. ‘Probably,’ my dad said right away. ‘I was well liked back then.’

Behind her hand, my mother shook her head. When my father left the room, she said, ‘We grew up in very different places.’

My father was a collector. He collected fossils, bugs preserved in blobs of amber, ships in bottles, and snow globes. ‘I like things that are trapped,’ he explained. ‘Too many things leave us forever.’ He even had a way of trapping memories-every time we got a ticket from a parking garage, he wrote a few details about where we’d parked and where we’d been and what we’d seen on the back of the stub. He did this with drycleaning slips, movie-ticket stubs, restaurant receipts, throwing it all in a big leather box at the foot of the bed. ‘All of these things are important,’ he said. ‘We’ll want to be reminded of it later.’ He’d been doing it the whole time I’d been alive.

Sometimes, when my father spent whole weekends in bed, I crawled in with him, and we watched cartoons. My father laughed at them as much as I did. When I got out of bed, he stayed, but I still thought I’d accomplished something. ‘Mom thinks you’re being lazy,’ I said to him once, not that long ago. ‘I’m not lazy,’ he answered, ‘I’m just sad.’

He got sad a lot. Once, my father started crying in a line at the movie theater, putting his face in his hands and shaking. My mother made him go around the corner to an alley because everyone was staring at us, wondering what was wrong. I thought I should go after him, but my mother grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘He’ll be fine.’

‘What’s he crying about?’ I asked.

My mother just shrugged and rolled her eyes. ‘It’s so embarrassing,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t know why he can’t just pull himself together. But it’s like he can’t help it.’

I wanted her to explain. What was so embarrassing? Crying? Feeling? Should I be angry at him, too? The movie posters blurred in front of my eyes. When it was our turn to buy tickets, we bought three, one for me, one for my mother, and one for my father. We waited for him to return from the alley, and then we went in the theater together.

Last Friday, when I came home from school, I found my father sitting at the kitchen table, looking at an envelope. His name was written on the front in my mother’s handwriting. She’d made the R in Richard very big, but the letters got smaller and smaller, descending into almost nothing. The d at the end wasn’t much bigger than a pencil point.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’ He covered it up with his hand.

We went to the ice cream parlor on the Promenade despite it being early December and cold. My father, well over six feet tall, towered over everyone else in the little shop. He was wearing the black wool overcoat my mother had bought for him. His face was clean-shaven, his thick, light brown hair combed off his forehead. He bought me an espresso milkshake, which I loved, even though they made me twitch. We sat in a little booth in the back, and he ate a whole scoop of butter pecan before he told me that Mom had gone on a work trip. She’d probably be back in a week or so; in the meantime, could I help him keep the house clean?

I said sure, no problem. I’d been helping keep the house clean for the past few months anyway, ever since my mother’s job had become more demanding. But I could tell there was something more. It was so easy to tell when my father was lying-his cheeks got very pink, and it looked like he was literally holding something in, like a sneeze. ‘Okay, okay, Mom isn’t on a trip,’ he blurted out, as if I’d harshly interrogated him. ‘She’s gone.’

His facial features seemed scrambled, like those tile puzzles where you have to move the pieces around to make a coherent picture. ‘What do you mean, gone?’ I asked.

He blotted his eyes with his sticky ice cream cone napkin. ‘She wrote a letter. But it wasn’t very clear.’

I felt an uneasy stab and let out a whimper. ‘No, Summer, please don’t cry,’ he said desperately. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

He bent over until his head touched the top of the table. His shoulders shook up and down. A few minutes went by, and he didn’t stop. ‘Dad?’ I touched his shoulder. ‘Come on.’

‘I just don’t know why this happened,’ he blubbered.

By this time, a horrible feeling was sloshing through me. I thought of the things I’d done wrong, all my shortcomings. This could be because of me. Because of something I wasn’t.

But I couldn’t have my father sitting in the ice cream shop, bawling. ‘Dad.’ I took him underneath the arm and pulled him up. ‘She’s probably just…overworked. I saw it on Oprah. People in this country get only ten days of vacation, but people in Europe get thirty. She probably went somewhere where there aren’t any ringing phones.’ It poured from inside me. When I finished, I reviewed what I’d just said, not sure if it made any sense.

He raised his chin. Some old ladies in the next booth over were staring. ‘Do you think?’ my father asked, his face red and wet.

‘Yes.’ I said it so confidently, I almost convinced myself.

My father ran his hand over his hair. ‘Jesus, Summer.’ He bumped into me, hugging my head to his. ‘I’m sorry I just did that. That’s the last thing you want to see, huh? Your crazy old dad, losing it in the ice cream parlor?’