The Opposite of Me (14 page)

Didn’t Matt see that the only way I knew how to survive this was by putting everything behind me, starting right now? I was moving on, and I’d have to do it at warp speed to accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish. I didn’t have time for regrets
and psychoanalysis and Bikram Yoga or whatever he thought I needed. Didn’t Matt know me well enough to know the only way I could get through this was to keep moving and working and
not
thinking?

I glared up at him and discovered he was glaring down at me. I couldn’t help it; I smiled. I’ve never been able to stay mad at him.

“You’ve got Reese Witherspoon’s lip gloss on your tooth,” Matt said. Then he smiled, too.

“Share a tutti-frutti for dessert?” I asked. It was the closest I could come to an apology. An apology for what, I wasn’t sure.

“Sure,” Matt said, and he unfolded his arms.

“We’ll definitely need another bottle of sake, please,” he told the waitress when she came over with our platters of food.

I looked up and met Matt’s brown eyes.

“Thanks,” I mouthed.

Matt stood on the platform, his hands in his pockets, watching as my train rumbled out of Penn Station. People bustled past him, nearly swallowing him up in their mad morning rush, but he stood his ground in his jeans and red fleece jacket. I’d argued that I could take a cab on my own to the station, but he’d insisted on seeing me off.

He’d put a note in my hand as I’d boarded the train. I looked down at it now.

“Psychiatric help, five cents,” he’d written next to a sketch of himself in Lucy’s booth. In the sketch he was wearing a beret and smoking a cigarillo.

“Call anytime,” he’d written. “I’m going to miss you, kiddo.”

I’m not going to cry, I told myself fiercely. I took a last look back at Matt. He looked smaller now that there was distance between us. I wished he’d smile. His face looked so sad without that big smile of his.

A year from now, I’d come back to visit Matt, I vowed. Or maybe I’d invite him to visit me. By then I’d be back to my old self. I’d show him around my office and my new apartment—because I definitely wouldn’t be living with my parents then—and he’d see how quickly I’d put my life back together.

One year, I promised myself. Twelve months. Three hundred and sixty-five days. I’d fill every second with work, and I’d be too busy to miss Matt and my old life.

A year wasn’t so long to wait, was it?

Part Two
 

 

Home

Eight
 

 

I HADN’T BEEN HOME in more than a year and a half, and I felt like Alice right after she shot through the rabbit hole to Wonderland. I could swear my parents had gotten smaller—either that, or I’d gotten bigger, which was a distinct and troubling possibility I refused to dwell on. I’d nearly walked right by Mom and Dad at Union Station, partly because I didn’t recognize them beneath the matching puffy down jackets that engulfed them from chin to knee.

“Fifty percent off at the Lands’ End outlet!” Mom crowed triumphantly, before she even hugged me hello. It was like being assaulted by an overly amorous marshmallow.

Dad, clad in the more manly brown version of the coat, was clutching a luggage cart in a death grip and shooting “Go ahead, make my day” looks at anyone who dared to venture within ten feet of it.

“Good to see you,” he said to me.

He reluctantly released one hand from the cart, but only after shooting a warning glance at a thieving granny who’d tottered dangerously close to it. Dad and I embraced in our usual tender way, with him patting my back as vigorously as if I were chok
ing and he was trying to dislodge a chunk of bread from my windpipe.

“You look wonderful,” Mom said, peering at my face once Dad had released me from his Heimlich and I’d gulped some air. “Tired, but wonderful. Are those circles under your eyes?”

“Got a luggage cart,” Dad announced. “I’ll load up your bags.”

“You must be hungry,” Mom said. “Is that coat warm enough?” She shivered theatrically. “Ooh, it’s so chilly out. Aren’t you chilled?”

“Did you have a good trip?” Dad asked. “Any delays?”

“I’m a little tired, not too hungry,” I said. Amazing how quickly I adapted to the parental volley of questions. It was like leaping aboard a bicycle after years at sea and taking off down the street without a wobble. Some things you never forget.

“My coat’s definitely warm enough,” I continued. “No delays. The trip was wonderful.” If your idea of a rollicking good time was trying in vain to read the latest journalistic investigation by the good folks at
People
magazine (“Are Hers Real? Stars Inflate Their Top Lines!”), then browsing the food car three times, half-finishing a crossword puzzle, and finally just staring out the window at the scenery rushing by, wishing you could jump out of the train and race along with it. I’d never been good at sitting still, and today it had been harder than usual.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said, interrupting a fresh assault of questioning.

“You too, honey,” Mom said, reaching out to tuck my hair behind my ears, like she’s been doing ever since I was three years old. I instinctively shook my hair back out, just like I’ve been doing ever since I was three years old. Dad, always more comfortable with action than words, made a production out of loading up the luggage cart.

“Knew this would come in handy,” he said, thumping the cart like it was a melon and puffing out his thin chest. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the three of us could easily manage my two medium-size suitcases.

“You’ve got to be starving after that trip,” Mom fretted, brushing imaginary lint from my shoulder.

“It was only three hours,” I protested. “And I had Chee-tos.” Plus, um, a tiny little chocolate-chip cookie. Hardly worth mentioning, really. And the only reason I ate a second one was because they came two to a package. I had no choice in the matter; I was a prisoner of Amtrak packaging.

“Still,” Mom said as we headed for the car. “We’re thinking of Antonio’s for lunch. Of course, they don’t always wash their silverware as well as they should.”

“Once,” Dad said, rolling his eyes toward heaven, which was presumably full of men who could sympathize with his plight. “You found a speck of dried spaghetti on your fork once. A
speck
. Better than that Indian place with the druggie hostess.”

“Just because she has blue hair doesn’t mean she’s an addict,” Mom said. “She could be expressing herself. She could be an artist. Someday she’ll be famous and you’ll be sorry you weren’t nicer to her. And it was more than a speck. It was easily a quarter strand.”

“That druggie hostess always makes me spell my name three times,” Dad grumbled. “Marijuana. It kills brain cells.”

“Well, you know we can’t go to Pines of Italy,” Mom said. “It gives you gas.”

“Only the garlic bread,” Dad protested, heaving my suitcases into the trunk of our old station wagon, the one with all the dents in the sides. Mom and parking garage columns don’t always play nice.

“But you can’t stay away from that garlic bread,” Mom said. “If you’d just have a piece or two instead of the whole basket—”

“Antonio’s sounds perfect,” I said. Mom and Dad both started, then looked back over their shoulders at me, like they’d forgotten I was there.

So, I might as well get this confession over with. Here’s the thing: I’d told my parents I was coming to Bethesda to open a new branch of Richards, Dunne & Krantz. In twenty-nine years, this was the only real lie I’d ever told my parents, notwithstanding one or two “Alex ate the last cookie,” garden-variety, arguably developmentally necessary childhood fibs. I’d hated doing it. It had felt all wrong, like wearing an itchy wool sweater to a picnic on a sweltering July afternoon.

But when I’d phoned to tell my parents I was moving back home, Mom had asked, “Moving home? But you’re doing so well in New York.”

Then her voice had grown the slightest bit shrill: “Aren’t you?”

And when Dad had jumped in on the other receiver and said, “Is everything okay, Lindsey?” instead of leaving any potentially emotional discussions to Mom and fleeing the room like a tornado was incoming, as he usually does, I’d frozen up. As their worried voices pelted me with questions, I’d thought about my last visit home. Dad had insisted on cleaning the gutters against all reason. The facts that it was raining, that the trees still had plenty of leaves left to shed, and that he’d just cleaned the gutters two months earlier were trifling, inconsequential details. Dad was gripped in the throes of a gutter-cleaning frenzy. So I steadied the ladder for him—someone had to do it, or he’d probably break both legs—and I found myself at eye-level with his ankles. Suddenly I was struck by how bony they were. The skin around them was loose and dotted with brown age spots I’d never noticed before.

At dinner that night, I’d looked at my parents—
really
looked at them—and I saw the changes that had come on so gradu
ally they’d been nearly imperceptible. The reading glasses and hesitation on the stairs, the gray overtaking Dad’s brown hair, the slight tremor in Mom’s hand when she lifted up a scoop of mashed potatoes—that night I saw it all too clearly. My parents were getting older. They wouldn’t be around forever. It wasn’t just Mom’s lumpy mashed potatoes that made me swallow extra hard.

My parents were so proud of me. Because I was successful, they considered themselves successes as parents. Their identity was knotted up in my own. How many times had I overheard Mom on the phone, satisfaction ringing through her voice as she talked about my perfect report cards or my acceptance to a half dozen colleges? I couldn’t become a disappointment to them, not now, not during what should be their golden years.