I nodded.
"I'll bet you take nice vacations," he said.
"We go to the beach in the summer."
"I took my kids to the beach. Your mother probably never mentioned that." He tapped the pack of cigarettes on the table.
I nodded and sneaked a look out the window, making sure Kevin was still there.
"Nice vacations," he said. "Nice school. Nice life. Well. She never was very generous with family..."
"She is. She takes care of me." I stuffed my hands in my pockets and lifted my eyes, telling him something that I'd never in a million years tell her. "She's a good mother."
"That's a surprise. You know, she didn't have the best example." I thought he meant himself, but then he started talking about Grandma Ann. "I should have known what she was when I married her," he said. "Nineteen sixty-eight, though. Who knew what a lesbian was back then? I don't blame myself."
I swallowed hard. My knees were bouncing up and down; my feet were jittering on the floor. "I should probably get going."
"I don't blame myself," he repeated. "I've been the victim. The victim of a fraudulent marriage, then an adulterous one. Have you read any Shakespeare?" he demanded. I didn't need my hearing aids to tell that his voice had gotten louder. People were staring at the two of us.
"A little. We did
Romeo and Juliet
in--"
"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child,'" he quoted. "That's your mother. That's all of them. Thankless."
"She's not." My tongue felt shriveled; my teeth felt like they'd been coated in sawdust. "She's not," I said again. I remembered the pictures from Grandma Ann's, from when my mother was older, how she'd always looked like she was cringing. I remembered how my mother would take me swimming in the ocean when I was little, staying close to the shore, letting me hold her shoulders as she kicked and paddled, how I'd floated above her back and felt like I was flying. I remembered what she'd said to Hope, the baby she'd had but hadn't wanted, on the last page of her book.
I will love you forever. I will keep you safe.
"I made her who she is." My mother's father gave me a sly, smug smile. "Read to her. Taught her to swim. Gave her all of her material. The story she told. And she made a fortune off it, didn't she? Where would she have been without me?"
"Happy?" The word was out of my mouth before I knew it. His face contorted, and for a minute I thought he was going to do something: yell or pick up his coffee cup and hurl it on the floor, or at my face.
I got to my feet. "I should go."
"Why'd you come here?" His voice was cold, mocking. "Did she send you here? Did you come to gloat? Tell her next time she can come and gloat herself. Come see the old man. Get a good look. See if that makes her..." His voice filled with spite. "Happy."
"I wanted to see you," I said. "That's all." My voice trailed off. "I left an invitation at your house." Then I was moving, and my chair had fallen to the floor, and I snatched my purse and practically ran out the door, through the parking lot, diving into the backseat of Kevin's car, where I sat with my head in my hands, shaking so hard that I could barely pull out the telephone, could barely make my fingers press the button that would connect me to home.
Kevin acted as if this was all perfectly normal. "Back to the hotel?" he asked as the phone started ringing.
I nodded. My eyes caught a flash of motion in the rearview mirror as the coffee-shop door swung open. "Hello?" said my mother. "Joy?" The car pulled smoothly out of the lot and into the street, but not before I saw my grandfather step, blinking, into the waning light.
"Joy?" my mother yelled in my ear. "Where are you?"
"I'm in California," I said. "I want to come home."
W
hen Joy was four years old, she started having headaches. She'd sit on the sofa with her head in her hands, pale and drawn, and nothing helped--not cool washcloths or Tylenol, not lying down in a dim room, not chamomile tea. "It hurts," she'd cry, tears streaking her cheeks. "It hurts and it will never stop hurting!"
We made the rounds from the pediatrician to the ophthalmologist to the otolaryngologist, ruling out ear infections and sinus infections and run-of-the-mill migraines. Finally, the neurologist proposed a night in the hospital and a series of tests, including an MRI of Joy's brain. "You think she's got a brain tumor?" I said, keeping my voice light, waiting for the inevitable
Of course not,
for the doctor to tell me that there were only so many medical problems one little family and one little girl could be expected to endure. Instead, he'd flipped the pages of her chart and told me that actually, his concern was a tumor in the paranasal sinus.
I stared at him, waiting for the punch line. None came. Two days later, we checked Joy into the hospital. I sat outside the chamber where the MRI was performed and watched Joy's prone, gown-clad body slide into the mouth of the machine. Her tiny, pale feet, with the remnants of red polish on the toenails, were almost more than I could stand, but I made myself lean forward, at the technician's urging, made myself speak into the microphone and say in a voice that did not tremble and did not crack, "Don't be afraid, baby. Mommy's right here."
"Don't be afraid," I said into my cell phone the next morning, remembering how I'd spent those twenty minutes offering God everything I could think of, up to and including years of my life, if only Joy would be safe and well. A few hours later, we had our diagnosis: stress headaches. She'd grow out of them. She'd be fine. "I'm on my way."
Joy sighed and said nothing.
"What were you thinking?" I blurted. I shoved my carry-on into the overhead compartment and buckled myself into my seat.
A wordless hum filled my ears. "Joy Leah Shapiro Krushelevansky--" I began.
"I went to see my grandfather," she muttered. "It was a big mistake."
I felt my breath whoosh out of me even though, at some level, I'd known that was where she'd gone. I'd known as soon as my mother had mentioned it.
"You were right," she said. "He isn't very nice."
Oh God. I swallowed hard, with my father's greatest, hardest hits playing on a loop in my head: calling me ugly, calling Elle stupid, telling Josh that he was a mistake. "What did he say to you?"
"Not much." She gave an unhappy giggle. "Nothing, really. I don't think he wants to come to my bat mitzvah, is all."
"Oh, honey." I remembered the day she came home from kindergarten, closemouthed and red-eyed, and how I'd finally pried it out of her that one of the other girls (Amber Gross? The name rang a bell) had said that Joy couldn't be her friend because she wore things in her ears. I'd delivered a politically correct speech about tolerance and understanding and how every kid was different, meanwhile entertaining a brief but vivid fantasy of figuring out which girl had hurt my daughter and drop-kicking all thirty-five pounds of her across the Philadelphia Academy's parking lot.
Joy sniffled. "I'm okay."
"Just hang on. I'll be there soon," I said.
Her voice was tiny. "I took your credit card. Your White Card. Am I in trouble?"
"Oh. Um." It took me a minute to recover myself. "Yes. Yes, you are, Joy, you're in a world of hurt!"
She giggled, because
in a world of hurt
was what I said to her, or to Peter, as a joke, something we'd been saying for years. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry about everything. I'm sorry I went to Tyler's bar mitzvah and that I lied to you."
"It's okay, it's okay," I crooned into the receiver, imagining rocking her when she was a baby, twining her curls around my fingers with her sweet weight in my lap. "It's okay. I'll be there soon. We'll figure it out. We'll be fine."
"J
oy!" I ran down the driveway in front of Maxi's white-shingled beach cottage (she called it a cottage even though it had five bedrooms, two additions, and a cook's kitchen as big as the one at the Ronald McDonald House) as my mother got out of the taxi and let her sweep me into her arms.
"Don't ever do that again," my mom whispered into my hair. I could tell that she was crying, and for a minute I thought I'd start crying, too.
"I'm sorry," I said. She ran her hands over my hair, touching my ears lightly, then my cheeks, inspecting me the way she used to when I was little to make sure I wasn't hurt.
"Are you all right?"
I nodded, then hung my head.
"Come on," she said as the taxi turned around in the driveway and pulled back onto Maxi's steep street. She pulled a sheaf of tickets out of her purse. "We'll fly back tomorrow morning." She raised her eyes to Maxi, who was waiting by the white-painted gate, thick with ruby-colored roses, in a polka-dotted sundress and matching wide-brimmed hat. "If that's okay?"
"Fine," Maxi said, and smiled. "I'm glad for the company."
My mom turned back to me. "Do you still have that credit card?"
I pulled it out of my purse and shamefacedly handed it over. "Good," she said, sliding it into her wallet. "I thought that maybe we'd do a little shopping."
My eyes widened. I'd been expecting any number of things: getting yelled at, getting grounded, having my bat mitzvah party canceled. A shopping trip wasn't one of them.
My mom smiled at my expression. "You're still in trouble, though. When you get home, you're grounded, and no TV privileges for a month, and you have to give me your cell phone when you're not at school."
I nodded, probably too eagerly, because her forehead wrinkled. "No allowance, either."
"Fine." And then, because no one was looking, I reached up and hugged her again.
Forty-five minutes later, my mom and Maxi and I walked into the Badgley Mischka boutique on Rodeo Drive, a street that I recognized from many viewings of
Pretty Woman
with my mother. "Thank your father for this," my mother said as a man in a uniform held the door open. "This was his idea, not mine." We stepped onto the thick ivory carpet, into the icy air-conditioned room, where the dresses were displayed like exhibits in a museum, ten of them hung on mannequins. I looked at each dress, gold and cream and silver and bronze, getting more and more panicky, until my mother tapped my shoulder and I turned around to find a salesgirl smiling at me with the pink-and-silver gown in her arms.
I followed as she hung the dress in a mirrored cubicle, along with the matching wrap, and a shoe box with a pair of silver sandals. "Thanks," I said. Then I looked at my mom. "Are you sure?"
"If it's what you want," she said, only a little reluctantly. "I still think it's very adult."
"I," said Maxi, "think it's lovely."
"And you're not being rewarded for running away," said my mom as she sat down on a stool in the dressing room opposite mine. "Just so we're clear on that. Your father thinks you should have the kind of dress you want. And on his head be it," she muttered as I shimmied the dress up over my hips, then stepped out of the dressing room with my back to my mom so she could zip me. She rested her hands on my shoulders, and for a moment we stood in front of the mirror: her with her eternal ponytail (neat, at least, today), me with my curls, her in her black shirt and khaki pants, me in that dream of a dress. My mother sighed and wrapped her arms around me. "Is it what you want? Does it make you happy?"
I nodded. She draped the wrap over my shoulders and turned to the manager, who was waiting behind us with his hands clasped. "We'll take it," she said.
The next morning, we were on an eight o'clock flight back home. After takeoff, my mom pulled out a book. I lifted the Badgley Mischka dress bag out from under the seat in front of me, where I'd tucked it, then slid it back. We'd reached our cruising altitude of thirty-two thousand feet when my mother stuck her book into the seat-back pocket, turned to me, and said, "I think we should talk."
"About what?"
She smiled. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe what made you decide to go to Los Angeles and hunt down your long-lost grandfather?"
I shrugged. "He was...pretty awful." There weren't words for what he was, I realized. Maybe that was why my mom and Aunt Elle and Grandma Ann all used the same ones.
Not a nice guy
didn't even begin to cover it.
Scary
was a better word.
Pathetic
worked, too. And
old.
He was an old, mean man with a book full of pictures of kids who'd grown up and didn't know him anymore. "He showed me all of these pictures from when you guys were kids," I said.
My mom seemed surprised. "Really?"
"You and Aunt Elle and Uncle Josh, and his other kids, too, I guess. And reviews of your book. And stories about you."
She didn't seem happy to hear it. "I wonder why."
"I found a tape of him at Grandma Ann's."
"A videotape?" She looked even more puzzled.
"No, a tape recording. You guys were kids. He was reading to you."
She nodded slowly. "He did that. When Aunt Elle and I were little girls." Her face softened at the memory.
"I don't know. He sounded so nice on that tape..." A lump was growing in my throat. "He sounded like my dad. But you were right. I should have listened. He wasn't very nice."
"He used to be," my mother said. She pressed her lips together, maybe remembering something tender: her father taking her ice skating, or teaching her to swim. "He used to be fantastic. That was the worst part of it," she said slowly. Her voice was shy, soft, even girlish. "He wasn't always awful, you know? He was a wonderful father for the first little while. He'd read to us and take us places. He'd teach us things."
"How to skate," I said. "How to swim."
"Yep. And he loved us..." She blinked and turned her face away. "He loved us so much before...Well, I don't know. Maybe what happened was chemical, or just a really bad midlife crisis. But I remember when he'd tell me that he was proud of me, it was the best feeling in the world. Because it was so rare, you know?" I could tell she was having a hard time finding words for this--my mother, who had something to say about everything, who'd tell me that words were her tools. "Grandma Ann was always proud of us, and we always knew she loved us, but with him, you didn't always know. So when he said it..." She crumpled an airplane napkin in her fist. I looked at her, then looked away. Peter told me how proud of me they were all the time. He read me books, he took me places. I never doubted for a minute that he loved me, or that my mother did, even if her love sometimes felt like a straitjacket. Even Bruce loved me, I thought. Even though he'd run away to Amsterdam. He'd come back, and done the best he could.
"I shouldn't have lied about him," she said heavily. "I'm sorry for that. It wasn't a good decision, but I thought it would be better for you to think he didn't care than to think that he cared for the wrong reasons. I thought that maybe later, when you were older, I could tell you the whole story. If you were interested."
I thought for a minute. Then I figured,
In for a penny, in for a pound,
which is something else my mother always says. I bent over and pulled my copy of
Big Girls Don't Cry
out of Mrs. Marmer's purse.
"Oh God," my mom said miserably. "That. Okay," she began, taking a deep breath. "Before you say anything, in my own defense, I wrote it when I was twenty-eight, and I'd been through a very bad breakup. Things in there were exaggerated for comic effect."
"Like how many guys Allie slept with?"
She winced. "Especially that. And, um, the angry and insecure thing. And thin-skinned and petty. All of that. All made up." Her lips curled upward, almost in spite of herself. "Except the fat part. That, sadly, is true." She thought about it. "Also thin-skinned. But as far as you're concerned, I was a virgin until the day I got married." She thought it over. "Well, until the day I met Bruce. Which, by the way, was when I was much, much older than you are." She sighed and bent down, reaching for her book. "What else?" she asked.
"You're a good mom," I said.
Her hands froze on her tote bag. "You think so?"
"The best," I assured her. From the way her shoulders were shaking, I thought she might be crying, but she pulled herself together and opened her book. "Can I just ask about one thing?"
"Sure." Her voice was a little wobbly.
"When you went to Los Angeles, in the book."
"When Allie went to Los Angeles," she corrected with a little smile.
"'To escape,'" I quoted. "'To escape and be reborn.'"
My mother rolled her eyes. "Boy, didn't I think I was the writer."
I ignored her. "The thing she was running away from..." And here it was, the root of it, the heart of my journey. "It was me, wasn't it?" I whispered. "You didn't want to have a baby."
Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Joy." She pulled me close to her, rubbing her hand against my curls. I rested my head against her chest, close enough so her breath rustled my hair when she whispered, "You were the thing I was running to. I just didn't know it yet."
Somewhere over Virginia, I told her about Tamsin, how she'd been the one to spill the beans on my mother's career writing Lyla Dare. She was just as shocked as I'd been. "Tamsin?" she said. "Tamsin Marmer? Your BFF?"
"She was mad at me," I admitted. "That's why she did it."
"Great," my mother muttered, and heaved a long, bosom-shifting sigh. "Oh well. Nothing to do about it now, I guess. Cat's out of the bag. Water under the bridge. When God closes a window, he opens a marriage."
"Huh?"
"Door," she said, shaking her head. "It's actually 'When God closes a window, He opens a door.'"
"Why would God open a marriage?"
Her cheeks were pink. "It's a joke," she said. "Old joke. There was this rabbi in Cherry Hill who had his wife murdered, and then he told his mistress that when God closes a window, He opens a door, only Peter and I would always say that when God closes a window, He opens a marriage. Anyhow. If it wasn't Tamsin, it probably would have been someone else eventually. It'll work out."
"So..." It seemed impossible, but I asked it anyway: "Are you grateful to Tamsin?"
She gave me a crooked smile and a shrug--not a yes, but not a no, either.
"Are you grateful to your dad?" I asked.
The captain came on the loudspeaker to announce that we were beginning our descent into Philadelphia. My mother was quiet for so long I wasn't sure that she was going to answer. Finally, she said, "The thing is, I got everything I wanted, you know? Eventually, I did. A husband and a wonderful daughter, and a beautiful home, and friends I love, and work..." Her voice trailed off. "When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there...whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time."
I must have winced, because she squeezed my shoulder. "Don't worry," she said. "Oh, and before we land, there's something else we need to discuss." She pulled open her tote bag. Underneath her book and her wallet and her bottle of water was a folder with a stack of printed pages and a photograph of Betsy, the woman from the website. "So listen," said my mom. "How would you feel about being a big sister?"