How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) (6 page)

“It's a real pleasure,” Ava was saying.

“Where's Daddy?” Cody demanded.

“His plane is late,” she said with a shrug. “He's coming in from Chile and he has sweaters for all of us.”

She said
Chee-lay
as if Spanish were her true language. I practically swooned.

“Oh, goodie,” my mother said sarcastically. “Even me?”

Ava laughed. “Maybe. You can never tell what Scott might do. So,” Ava said to me, “let's get going, shall we? Marthe has the baby and I promised we'd come right back.” She turned her attention back to Mom. “Marthe's our nanny. Honestly, she runs our life. We wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning without her.”

I adored Marthe, even though I never understood anything she was saying. She smelled like sweet cinnamon buns, the kind my mother used to make for breakfast on snowy mornings. I missed those mornings, Mom and Dad bustling around the kitchen and Cody and me drawing pictures at the kitchen table. Thinking about it, I can almost smell
the strong coffee brewing and the rich cinnamon of those pastries.

“Do you want to share a cab downtown?” Ava was asking Mom.

“No, thanks,” my mother said.

I wondered if she had imagined sharing a cab downtown with Dad while she was in the bathroom on the train, foolishly putting on lipstick and perfume. I found myself wondering what Dad would do if he saw her right now, smelling good and looking almost hopeful. Deep down I knew he would do absolutely nothing. He was married to Ava now. I kissed Mom as fast as I could, gulping a big dose of Chanel Number 5. It was weird standing between Mom and Ava. I just wanted to get out of there.

Cody clung to her leg whispering, “Mama, Mama, don't leave me like this.”

I disentangled him. I wanted to get away from my mother and melt into life with my father and Ava. We only had the weekend. Every minute counted.

“Good-bye!” I shouted to her, dragging Cody along by the elbow. Even his sniffling couldn't ruin my mood. I felt lighthearted and happy.

I linked arms with Ava. Everyone who saw us would think she was my mother. “Tell me everything you and Daddy have done since I was here last.” I hoped my mother saw me walking out like this, arm in arm with Ava Pomme, the Tart Lady.

M
arie Taglioni, the famous Italian ballerina, was so famous that they named stuff after her. In Russia, for example, there were Taglioni caramels and cakes and even hairdos. After her last performance in 1842, someone bought her ballet shoes for 200 rubles, cooked them, and served them with a special sauce. Then her fans ate them! That sounds like something people would do for a saint, doesn't it?

Marie Taglioni was also very plain-looking. Her teacher in France said, “Will that little hunchback ever learn how to dance?” And then Marie Taglioni became
the
perfect image of a ballerina. Standing en pointe in her white tutu with her hair parted in the middle and pulled back, wearing a floral
wreath. So certainly, I, Madeline Vandermeer, could take it when my gum-chewing second-rate ballet teacher Misty Glenn yelled at me during class: “Madeline, what are you, a chicken? You're holding your arms like you have chicken wings!” If that wasn't bad enough, then Misty Glenn said, “Cluck! Cluck!” and a bunch of girls laughed.

Not Demi Demilakis, a girl in my class. She looked at me with pity. She has these really bulgy eyes, like a frog. Like any minute they might pop right out of her head. She'd just moved here from Cleveland, of all places. I asked her once after class if she knew my old friend Rose Malone and those eyes of her went all bulgy and she said, “She was in my grade at Gilmore!” Demi missed Cleveland. Her father used to take her surfing on polluted Lake Erie and she had her birthday party at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now she's just a new kid, like me.

Still, I didn't want her pity. When she looked at me that way, I glared at her hard. She shrugged and went back to her lazy arabesques. The girl in front of me was wearing a tie-dyed leotard. Madame would have made her leave class. And the girl in front of her was barefoot. Leave it to my mother to find this place.

“Nice extension!” Misty Glenn said.

It took me a minute to realize she was talking to me. She yelled everything, like a gym teacher.

I knew I had a nice extension. I didn't need Misty Glenn to tell me that. One thing was certain, I was suffering. Sainthood had to be right around the corner.

The next day at school, Mai Mai Fan almost knocked me down in the hallway. She was carrying her cello case and heading for the front door.

“Sorry, Madeline,” she called over her shoulder. “I can see you are miserable, but I don't want to miss my bus.”

“What bus?” I asked her. She didn't stop, of course. Mai Mai never stopped.

I hurried to catch up with her. “What bus?” I said again.

“My bus to Boston. I have my advanced cello lesson there every Monday afternoon. At the Conservatory,” she added. “No one here can teach me anything anymore.”

If some kids said these very words, they would be bragging. But not Mai Mai. Her life was a giant list of accomplishments. That's really all she had to talk about. She was excellent at everything.

“Do you take that bus alone?” I asked her.

“Of course. I get off at South Station and get on the Red Line,” she said.

She told me every step she took, but I stopped listening. If Mai Mai Fan, age eleven—she had skipped a grade—could take a bus and a subway to Boston and back by herself, then surely so could I.

“Now you look happy,” Mai Mai said. “Good.”

She ran out the door, and disappeared.

“No way,” my mother said. “No way.”

“Mai Mai Fan—” I started, but my mother looked at me all puzzled.

“What?” she said.

“Mai Mai Fan is a who, not a what,” I told her. When your daughter has only a couple of friends, you would think a mother might remember their names.

“The chess champion?” my mother said.

“She is only eleven and she takes the bus by herself every Monday.”

We were on our way home from school. I hadn't wasted any time. Returning to Madame's class was too important.

“I am the king of the air,” Cody said from the backseat. He had on a stupid paper crown that all the kindergarten kids had made that day.

“Then you are the king of exactly nothing,” I told him. “Air is nothing.”

My mother had already moved on in topics of conversation. “I have to stop at Whole Foods and see if they carry pomegranate molasses. Jessica says everything is pomegranate this year.”

“If air is nothing, then why do we say good night to it in
Goodnight Moon
?” Cody said. I could tell he was close to breaking down, and that made me feel slightly better.

With this renewed strength of purpose I said, “Maybe I'll just go and live with Daddy and go to the American Ballet Theatre school.” For some peculiar reason, when I said this I felt queasy, not elated.

“She wants me to do an entire pomegranate menu,” my mother said with disgust. “As if kids like pomegranates.”

I looked at her. I had just threatened to leave home and all she could talk about were pomegranates?

Cody was starting a full-fledged meltdown. “Are those
the little orange things where we have to eat the skin?” he was saying, all panicked.

“No,” I said, my voice as sweet as pomegranate molasses, “they're the red things where you eat just the seeds.”

“Why do you act this way?” my mother said.

“They
are
the ones where you eat the seeds,” I told her. Then I looked out the window. We were driving down Waterman Street and it was clogged with students from Brown University.

“And by the way,” I said, “were you even listening to me? I said if you didn't let me go to Boston on the bus by myself then I would go and live with Daddy.” That queasy feeling came right back, as soon as I said those words.

My mother stopped the car, right there in the middle of Waterman Street. “Isn't life strange?” she said.

The car behind us honked its horn, but she just sat there, shaking her head.

“You know I don't like seeds,” Cody was crying. “Or skin on fruit. Or fuzzy fruit like kiwi and peaches.”

The car behind us squeezed past, and the driver swore at my mother.

“Have you ever heard of Persephone?” my mother asked me.

“Uh, no,” I said. I was starting to feel a little nervous. Also, I didn't like not knowing something.

“Persephone was a Greek goddess and she got kidnapped by the god of the underworld. Her mother, whose name I can't remember, was devastated, and eventually Zeus sent someone to rescue Persephone. But she ate these three pomegranate seeds and that forced her to return to the underworld every year for one month for each seed she ate. Three seeds. Three months. That's winter.”

More cars were honking now.

My mother looked at me, satisfied. “That is an allegory for what is going on in this car, Madeline,” she said, and she started to drive again.

I wanted to ask her what an allegory was. In Humanities we had just covered onomatopoeia and similes, not allegories. But I knew what she'd say.
Look it up.

Ever since my father married Ava and went on to have a real life, I have had to do a lot of thinking. In science, Mr. Renault calls that developing the power of observation:
watching something and drawing conclusions from what you see. Like we watched snails for weeks in science class. You would be amazed what you can learn from watching a bunch of snails. I had the misfortune of being paired up with Michael Montana, who smells like a wet sweater even when he's not wearing a sweater. His powers of observation, however, are incredible. He can tell snail poop from gravel in a nanosecond. I let him take the notes so that I could better my own powers of observation.

“Once you have developed your powers of observation here in the laboratory,” Mr. Renault told us, “you can use them anywhere in the outside world.” He seemed to be talking to me when he said, “Use them in your own habitat, for example.” The most important thing I observed about my own habitat was that my mother was not living a real life. She was all alone and wrote stuff that people read in doctors' offices months late and only then out of boredom. She wrote things she didn't even believe in herself. In essence, she lied.

Take that stupid article about strawberries and Easy-Make Jelly, Strawberry Shortcake, and a snack of Strawberries Dipped in Yogurt and Brown Sugar. It was true that she dragged us to a strawberry patch one blistering hot summer
afternoon. Bees and mosquitoes buzzed all around us, annoying me and scaring Cody. We picked and picked, a boring few hours spent awkwardly bent over, getting dirt in our fingernails. Then we had to go home and eat so many strawberries and strawberry pies, cakes, waffles, and preserves that Cody broke out in hives and had to take oatmeal baths for a week.

But did the article mention any of that? Of course not. It talked about the joys of being outdoors picking stupid strawberries. It never mentioned the bees or the hot sun or any of the true things. In it, a phony family sits in a field somewhere surrounded by strawberries, every one of them grinning like a bunch of idiots. My mother works so hard at making up a life, she never spends time on the one she really has. I used to think her articles were kind of cute. Corny, but cute. That was when we were a happy family. Now I feel like we're no different than the phony family in the pictures.

However, my powers of observation revealed that my father's life really was like something out of a magazine. He had a beautiful wife who smelled like something exotic and romantic and took me to shops in the East Village to try on platform shoes and black miniskirts. He had a real
career where he could write about true things that mattered to the world.

When I told my father that I was going to come and live with him if Mom didn't let me take the bus to Boston like Mai Mai Fan, he said, “Madeline, I will convince your mother to let you take that bus. Don't worry.”

“But if she says no, absolutely not, I can come and live with you, right?” I said.

“This may not be the most opportune time for that,” he said.

My stomach got that queasy feeling again. “You mean I can't live with you?” I said.

“This is a moot point, because you will be on that bus and back at Madame's in no time.”

“A what?” I said, wondering how I would ever learn all of these vocabulary words.

“Look it up,” he said.

I know that ballerinas and saints have to sacrifice a lot and suffer both physically and mentally. Maybe I would become the Patron Saint of Ballerinas and ballerinas from all over the world would leave me offerings of toe shoes and leg warmers.

I decided to write another letter to the Pope. I told him about my idea. I told him I would be in Italy in June. I signed the letter,
The Future Patron Saint of Ballerinas
. Then, because that sounded a little too smug, I added a question mark. Then an exclamation point. Then I mailed it and waited for him to answer.

When we lived in Boston, I had three best friends—the girls with flower names—and eight regular friends, which made eleven friends total. Eleven friends was the perfect amount. But when we moved to Providence I had exactly no best friends. Sometimes I got invited to someone's house after school, but it never worked out. I would tell them about my miracles and they would want to watch reruns of
Friends
. I would discuss various saints; they would discuss
Teen Vogue
.

For a while I thought Eliza Harrison would be my best friend. Her mother is my mother's best friend—read: only friend—here. While our mothers sit in the Harrisons' basement drinking white wine, Eliza and I go up to her room on the third floor. She has the whole floor, which sounds very fancy, but it's really the attic of their house, so it's just a big open space covered with stuff from Target. She pronounces
it
Tar-jay
, which is really annoying. Eliza should go and work at Target because she loves it so much.

One day she said, “Have you seen the dollar bins at Tar-jay? I got all this stuff for pedicures there and it only cost thirteen dollars.”

When I didn't answer because I didn't really know what to say to that ridiculous piece of information, Eliza said, “Duh, all of these things were only a dollar each.”

I said, “I hate Target.” This wasn't actually true. I am neutral about Target.

“Madeline,” Eliza said, “why do you have to be so weird?”

This was from a girl who wore peds with her sneakers, those strange little socks they make you use in shoe stores to try on shoes. Eliza also only read books on the summer reading list; she had no imagination. Also, she played field hockey all the time. In the summer she went away to field hockey camp and during the school year she played field hockey on about a thousand different teams. Her thighs looked like tree trunks. I could have told her that. I could have pointed out my own delicate legs, how ballet gave you grace and poise while field hockey only allowed you to run
around with a stick and get thick thighs. But I didn't. Instead, I acted saintly.

I said, “Eliza, when I am a saint we'll see who's weird,” which made no sense but it was the only thing I could say without crying from frustration.

When my mother finally finished drinking wine with Mrs. Harrison and we went home, instead of giving me sympathy, she said, “Maybe she's giving you a helpful hint.”

“Not everything fits under a magazine headline,” I told her. “You can't buy a personality at Tar-jay.” Then I said, “I bet Daddy would understand.”

“Your father,” my mother said, shaking her head, “has ruined everything for everybody.”

I started to go to church every Sunday. My mother thought I was just getting some fresh air, something she put far too much value in. My research revealed that even though I hated to admit it, she had been right about something: Saints were all Catholic. So Catholic that they died defending the religion. These were called martyrs. I liked the idea of martyrdom, but I didn't want to die. So I started giving up
little things: Twizzlers, for one. Sleeping late on Sundays, for another. Instead of staying in my bed, piled up with blankets the way I liked, I got up and put on a nice skirt, and went to church.