How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) (4 page)

3. My monthly column “Food Is Fun!” in
Family
. My job is to create recipes that are healthy, interesting, and delicious. Nothing like creamed canned tuna on toast like my own mother used to make. Instead, I write about things like fun Asian food—cold noodles with peanut butter sauce, steamed dumplings, wilted bok choy. The kids hate this food I make for the column. They want what they call “real food”—macaroni and cheese from a box, chicken nuggets, fish sticks. Still, every Friday night, after a week of researching ideas and writing my column, we all sit down together and test my recipes. They grimace and gag and spit out my carefully rolled turkey meatballs, my tortellini with a creamy artichoke heart sauce, my delicate flan. “Kids love cream sauce,” I write later that night, after my own kids have gorged themselves on nacho cheese tortilla chips and gone to bed. “And they will take to artichoke hearts the way our generation took to SpaghettiO's.”

I like this column because I get to be creative, for one thing, and because I get to bring in $2500 a month, which makes me feel independent from my no-good, suddenly
incredibly wealthy, married to somebody else husband. I mean ex-husband. But I won't go there.

4. My cookbook,
Cooking for Kids Is Fun!
. It sold moderately well in big cities like Boston and Los Angeles and failed miserably in places like my own home state of Indiana. The book is filled with sidebars about things like the joys of berry picking with your kids, then going home and making fresh jams and cobblers. On the back cover is a black-and-white picture of me grinning foolishly, with a somber Cody on one side of me and a scowling Madeline on the other, standing in front of our 1919 enamel Glenwood stove, looking like we were straight out of
Little House on the Prairie
. Did I mention that I also love that stove?

5. (or is it 6?)
Family
is sending me to Italy to research authentic Italian recipes. When I get back, I get to write a feature called “Traveling With Kids Is Fun!” My editor, Jessica, a single, childless woman in her twenties, is delighted by even the moderate success of the cookbook. “I've got big plans for you,” Jessica said, and on my good days I imagine summers in Asia, in South America, in India. I imagine more cookbooks, a wider audience. I imagine myself
as famous as that wonderful ex-husband of mine, Scott, as rich as Scott. That's on my good days. Did I mention that I don't like Jessica? She is fifteen years younger than I am, a real blonde, a Harvard graduate. She dates an MTV talk show host. She wears short dresses and knee-high suede boots in colors like lavender and baby blue. Jessica is a hard person to like.

7. (or is it 6? There is no 7 (or is it 6?))

I took that list and folded it very small, the way I folded notes in school that were not meant for just anybody to read. It proved things, this list. It proved that my mother did not like Jessica even though whenever she talked to her on the phone she gushed and said things like, “You are something else!” It proved my mother was crazy jealous of my father, just because he was brave and smart and had done something meaningful with his life, unlike her. It proved how insincere and insecure she was. How could a person like my mother keep a person like my father in love with her? If she had been different, someone more like his new wife, Ava, we would still be a family. The list proved everything.

On the way to school the morning after our mother gave us the thrilling news about the trip to Italy, Cody made an announcement: He was afraid. He was afraid of Mount Vesuvius erupting and then burning us to death while we were in Italy. But I knew, and even our mother knew, that he was also afraid of swimming in the ocean because there could be sharks; of sailing because there could be icebergs; of sleeping alone because there were ghosts, vampires, strangers; of flying because planes crashed or, worse, disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. Cody was probably the only five-year-old kid who preferred the History Channel over Nickelodeon.

Mom put on her most cheerful voice.

“We probably won't even see Mount Vesuvius, buddy,” she said, glancing into the rearview mirror at Cody, who sat stiffly smack in the middle of the backseat.

“That's all you see in Naples,” I said.

“Why, thank you, Madeline, for your sudden interest in the geography of Italy,” my mother said, glaring.

I sat beside Cody, squashed between the door and his car seat. Would he ever outgrow that stupid thing? I wondered, scowling over my Spanish vocabulary words. My father said
Spanish was perhaps the single most important thing I would learn because one day soon more people would speak Spanish than any other language. My father was always right.

“We don't have airbags, do we?” Cody said anxiously.

“In this old heap?” I laughed. “You've got to be kidding!” Mom drove an embarrassing 1984 Volvo 240 with almost two hundred thousand miles on it and a huge dent on the front from the time she chased after my father once when they were fighting. She plowed right into Sophie's parents' new Lexus. “Now look what you've done,” my father said, jumping out of his own VW.

“They didn't even have airbags when they made this car,” I told Cody. “They weren't even invented yet.”

“Because airbags kill kids, right?” Cody said, looking at me.

“Volvos are the safest cars made,” Mom said. “Did you know that?”

“You told me a zillion times,” he said, sighing.

“There you go,” she said, forcing a smile.

“Miles's mother has airbags in her car. So don't let her ever pick me up, okay?”

“Gotcha,” she said. “Right-o.” She took a breath.

Miles's mother was supposed to pick Cody up from school that very afternoon. It was written on the big calendar in the kitchen. I started to keep count of my mother's lies. Two since we got in the car and the entire day still stretched before us. Sometimes my mother tells me that I have an unbalanced view of what has happened to our family. “There are two sides to every story, Madeline,” she likes to say. But my father doesn't lie. In his kind of journalism, he
exposes
lies.

“First grade is the hardest grade, right?” Cody said. “I'm in the hardest grade right now, right?”

“Oh, please,” I groaned. “Do you have Spanish? Do you have to know the state capitals? All fifty of them?”

“So,” Mom said, “about my great news. The trip? Isn't it great? You and me and Madeline. The three of us. All together.” She looked at me in the mirror and added, “All expenses paid. By the magazine.”

That was how peasants went to Italy, I suppose.

“I don't want to go,” Cody said. “I want to stay home with you and watch television this summer. I want first grade to be done for me and you to stay in bed all day and watch—”

“Italy!” our mother said with so much enthusiasm that
she swerved the car into the next lane. “We're all going to Italy and we'll see museums and the Colosseum. We'll see everything.”

She glanced back again. Cody had slumped down so far I wondered if she could see him at all.

“You can pick the things you want to see and we'll go see them,” she said weakly.

“Uh-huh,” said Cody.

“Great,” she said. “Isn't this great?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Clearly,” I said, closing my Spanish book firmly, “we are both sooooo thrilled.”

We turned into the school parking lot, where kids were pulling out of minivans and station wagons. They all seemed so much happier than us, practically skipping through puddles in their bright rain boots, flashes of red and yellow and green, backpacks swaying as they moved. I looked down at my own stupid shoes, imagining my bright yellow rain boots left behind in the front hallway. When had bright rain boots become cool? And how did my mom know? Why did these things always pass me by?

“Here we are,” our mother said, turning off the car.

“Uh-huh,” Cody said.

She sat there for an instant, then she said, “You know, you two, I wish I could twitch my nose and make your lives better—put Cody in the top reading group, beatify Madeline, give you both a full-time father, one who wouldn't leave.”

She was about to cry; I knew that. This was the very type of thing she said before she started to cry. So I chose not to correct her and tell her that saints got canonized, not beatified.

I saw the smiling face of Miles's mother, Julia, hooded in a bright green rain slicker. Then she tapped on the window and my mother sniffled and took deep, relaxing breaths, which is what she did to pull herself together. The window on the driver's side no longer went down (or if it went down it did not go back up); so my mother opened my window instead. Everything about Julia was bigger than life: hair, face, fingernails. She was like a Godzilla, and by that I mean the original Godzilla, not the terrible remake. “Remakes stink!” my father always said.

Julia leaned her big head in and grinned at Cody. “Hey!”
she said in her Southern drawl. “You're coming home with me today, you little goober.”

I winced, right in her face. Julia called all children “goober,” which she claimed meant “peanut.” “Trust me,” Julia would say, “I'm from Georgia and I know my peanuts.” But it reminded me of something in your nose. Privately, Cody and I called Julia “booger,” which always sent Cody into a fit of giggles.

Beside us loomed Julia's car, also big, and brand-new, with airbags waiting to get Cody.

Julia opened the back door and I jumped out. She was already adjusting Cody's backpack, tightening the straps even though he liked them so loose that the pack bounced against him. Miles and his older sister Suki were waiting patiently at the front door of school, frozen in place like kids in a J. Crew catalogue. I stood next to my mother and watched as Cody let himself be led away by Julia. His backpack was my old one from kindergarten, purple with hot pink trim. He wore my old rain slicker, too, a yellow one with a hood made like a duck's face, the bill an orange visor, two eyes peering above it. The combination made him look small and vulnerable, like a kid that anything could happen to. Mom
must have been thinking the same thing because she called out to him.

“Cody!” she called. “You'll be in the back. Don't worry.”

Julia and Cody turned. “What's that?”

“The airbags,” Mom shouted, “are only in the front!”

Julia looked at her, confused, but Cody nodded.

“Have a good day!” our mother shouted to him.

“You, too!” he said, his voice tiny and high.

I thought maybe Mom should have walked him inside, but she was already upset so I didn't point that out to her.

Cody's voice drifted across the parking lot to us.

“What?” Mom shouted.

“I said,” he screamed, “in a plane crash do the kids die, too? Or just the grown-ups?”

“The plane won't crash, Cody!” Mom called to him. “It's going to be great! You'll see!” But Cody didn't wait for her to answer. He just kept walking fast with his head down.

Señor Valdez, my Spanish teacher, stopped to stare at us from under his umbrella. I pretended not to notice. Finally, right before I died from embarrassment, he started walking again. I jumped out of the car, fast.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, hurrying away from my mother, “we're all just fine.”

One of my favorite things to do was listen in on my parents' telephone conversations. Even before they got divorced I liked doing it. Back then it was stuff like “Can you pick up Madeline at ballet?” or “Can you call Alexis to babysit?” Stuff that made me feel like warm toast inside. Family stuff. We don't have a family now. It's more like an unraveled sweater, pieces of it everywhere, the whole thing coming apart. The whole thing ugly. More irony: My mother worked for
Family
magazine. Ha!

I used to pick up the phone and listen and not even care if they knew. “Hang up, Madeline,” Mom might say. Or Dad would say, “What are we going to do about Mad? Send her to spy school?” in a really deep fake voice and then I would laugh. And then we would all three laugh. But once they got divorced I had to be more careful because chances were they would be fighting when I picked up the phone. If my mother was downstairs on the kitchen phone, I had to slip into her office and switch the phone on to speaker. They never knew I was sitting there listening.

After the trip of a lifetime got announced, they had a lot of long-distance arguments.

“I think it would have been good, appropriate even, if you had asked me before deciding to take my kids halfway around the world,” my father said.

“Really?” my mother said. “Well, I think it would have been good, appropriate even, if you'd asked before you decided to leave our family.”

My mother spent that first year crying and angry. Angry that he'd left her, angrier that he'd married someone else.
That tart,
she used to say. That was my mother's idea of a joke; he had married a woman who made tarts for a living, the woman gourmet magazines called
The Tart Lady, Ava Pomme
. My mother did not even believe that her real name was Ava Pomme, that someone who would grow up to make tarts for a living would be named the equivalent of
apple
, and that her most famous tart was in fact her apple tart. “It's all a little too convenient, isn't it?” my mother wondered out loud all too often.

“Actually,” my father continued, “I don't think you can even take them without my permission.”

“Scott,” she said, “don't be foolish. The magazine is paying for me to take the kids and eat our way through Italy. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

My mother had this idea about my father's new life, that it was filled with champagne and perfectly flaky crust, with a country house and a loft in the city, with cocktail parties and black-tie events. For the most part, she was right. What made her feel even worse was that in just one year, my father and Ava were married with a baby of their own, a little girl named Zoe. They were a family. They were a family and
we weren't
. We were three people who lived unhappily in a run-down house in Providence. I wanted to be a part of my father's real family more than anything, except being a saint. If I wasted my time making lists, number one, I would be a saint, number two I would live in New York City in my father's real family, and number three, I would be in a full-time ballet school.