Glitter and Glue (10 page)

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like,” she said, straightening pens and pencils on her desk, “like … where babies come from.”

“Mom, I’m sixteen!”

“I’m just asking—” She polished a letter opener on her sweater. “So … nothing at all?”

I
had
noticed something in the Reilly master bathroom the last time I babysat. “Okay …” I hesitated. “Well, yeah, there is one thing.”

“Oh?” She looked uneasy.

“Yeah. What’s a douche?”

“Oh, Kelly!” She shrieked like I’d put a centipede on her leg. “That is dis-GUS-ting!”

“It is? Even Summer’s Eve?” I pictured the pretty lady on the box walking through a bright forest in a very clean sundress.

“Blech.” She lowered her voice. “If you must know, a douche is something you squirt in your privates if they get dirty, which yours won’t, so let’s not get too involved in a discussion about douches. God almighty!” She turned her back to me. “And to think Susan Reilly is Catholic!”

Recalling this tête-à-tête with my mother, I’m inspired to write up a point-blank puberty cheat sheet for Milly. Bras, deodorant, zit management; pads, tampons, rubbers, and—though I was haunted by the image of a product that power-cleaned dirty vaginas—douches. But it’s not my place. I’m a temp. Anyway, you probably can’t get a kid from girlhood to womanhood with a one-page summary. It probably takes years.

Milly has dance class after school; I’m taking her while John blasts the soundtrack of
Fiddler on the Roof
and finishes painting the trim along the back of the house.

“Milly!” I call across the school playground, holding a bag with all her dance stuff. “You ready?” When she reaches me, her cheeks are flushed from running and the hair she thinks is so inadequate has fallen from either side of this morning’s French braid, my big fix undone already.

“I need a hair band,” she says in her queen-mum accent, which sometimes makes me feel crass and poorly educated.

“Do you want me to do another braid?” I take out the hairbrush I brought, and she takes it.

“No.” My access to her has been revoked. This morning was
a fluke. “I’m fine.” Milly yanks the brush through her hair while I stand there, resisting the considerable urge to step behind her and untangle her hair, working from the ends up to the roots like my mother made me.

In the lobby of the dance studio, Martin is quiet, lost in a confrontation between a handful of plastic horsemen and foot soldiers—
Torture! Kill! Die!
—his tone inappropriately cheerful, as usual. A few mothers page through magazines; one does her bills, ripping checks off the pad with terrific purpose.

Through a glass window, I watch Milly turn her feet out in arabesque. She’s short on balance, but she grins as she holds her pose, glancing at friends around the room. Seeing her at ease fills my chest, like I’ve inhaled a hit of her mood. I’ve felt sorry for people before—I spent four years in college dorm rooms, trading sob stories over Domino’s and Diet Coke—but feeling another person’s joy like this is a new kind of empathy.

On the way out of class, I hand Milly her bag, along with her copy of
The Seven Wonders of the World
, a recent go-to.

“Thank you, Keely,” she says casually, like she doesn’t hate me at all.

“My brother has that book,” says some girl in a tracksuit. “That’s a boy book.”

“What?” Milly asks, looking stung.

“That book—it’s for boys,” the girl says as she heads to the swinging door. “Boy boy boy.”

“She’s crazy,” I say to Milly. “The Seven Wonders? Everyone loves the Seven Wonders.”

Milly doesn’t look at me. “Here, you take it,” she says, shoving the book at Martin and pushing through the other girls to get to the front door.

I grind my teeth as Tracksuit Girl skips (skips!) down the
sidewalk in front of us, swinging off her mother’s arm. I want to barrel after them and grab the girl’s shoulders and scream into her snotty face,
You know what’s boy boy boy? Tracksuits!

For better or worse, I’ve latched on to Milly’s ecosystem. What happens to her happens—in some weird refracted way that seems slightly dangerous—to me, too. And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

By the time Evan comes in with the morning paper and a pencil, I’ve knocked out six letters. I fold my last blue aerogram and run the glossy edge across my tongue.

“Hey,” he says, dropping down next to me.

“Hey.” I tuck the envelope addressed to Mom Corrigan into the center of the pile. “How was Rovers?”

“Good, yeah. So, you ever play chess?”

“No. Backgammon … Rummy 500 … Spit.” Spit makes him flip on a high-beam smile that’s so much flashier than the rest of him. “You don’t know Spit? It’s a good game!”

“Yeah. So is chess. Want to learn?”

“Sure.”

He puts an ottoman between us and sets up a board. He explains that there are sixty-four squares, eight by eight. He shows me the bishops and rooks, and tells me which pieces move diagonally, which by alley. He uses the words
blockade, obstruct, isolate
. I like them all, the way they sound, their metaphoric quality.

“This is your queen, your most essential piece. Only the queen has full range, meaning she can move in multiple directions. So always be aware of her and protect her. Once she’s gone, it’s a whole different game,” he explains, like someone who remembers well the pain of losing his queen.

“You write a lot of letters,” he says as he slides a pawn forward.

I pick the same pawn on my side and mirror his move.

“I’m a junkie for mail,” I say.

“You get a lot of letters back?”

I shrug. “Not really.” In the beginning, I heard from lots of friends, but eventually they went back to their lives, and now the only people who write regularly are my parents. My mom pens three or four letters for every one my dad scratches out. “So I’m pretty much just moving pawns. Should I be doing more?” I ask, switching topics.

“It’s slow in the beginning. Your mum must write,” he switches back, calling her out in a way that startles me.

“Oh, yeah.”

“What’s she like?”

“My mom? She doesn’t play chess, I can tell you that. She likes other games—backgammon, bridge. Actually, I always think of her when you bring in the newspaper. She’s big on the crossword, too. She does it while she has her Sanka.”

“Is that medication?” he says, moving another pawn.

“Sanka? No, it’s like coffee … fake coffee … coffee crystals.”

He wants to know more about my mother, so I go on, even though the ground around this subject feels slippery.

“She spends a long time with the morning paper in general. She looks at the bridge hand, she checks her stocks, she does the Jumble—your paper doesn’t have that—and then she goes to church and, after that, to work.” I look at the board, wanting to do something bold and maybe regrettable—move the rook, slide the bishop out—something to match this conversation.

“What’s her job?”

“She sells houses.” I chicken out and move another pawn.

“What else?” He’s hungry for details.

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s smart, or so my dad says. Big reader.
She’s the one who told me to read the book I’m reading now,
My Ántonia
.” He moves a rook. I decide to go big. “Was your mom into books?” I ask, looking up at him.

I don’t look away, even though I feel shivery and unsure. A piece of his hair falls by his cheek and I have the urge to tuck it behind his ear. Nothing at all happens for a second, and then he meets my eyes. “Yeah.” This is the first time we’ve held each other’s gaze, and I am charged with affection for him. After a beat, he picks up his knight. “See, up two and over one. Or I could have gone over one and up two.” Chess is not going to be my game. Too many choices, too many subtleties.

“Okay, then, so, I’m going to try this,” I say, sliding my rook, impatient for action. We play for a while in silence. He doesn’t remind me to keep an eye on my queen or ask me any more questions about my mom, and I don’t ask him any more about his, and after about ten minutes he looks at the clock.

“Hey, I probably ought to get a shower before work. Do you mind if we leave things here and come back later?” He stands.

“Of course. That’s a lot of ground to cover for one day.”

He moves the board to a safe place.

“It gets easier to understand. You’ll figure it out,” he says, even though I think we both know I won’t.

“Hi, I’m picking up mail,” I say, setting my open passport on the American Express counter.

The clerk disappears. I smile at her colleague, who took care of me last week. I may be a bold girl, jumping continents, Paul Revering that
Things happen when you leave the house
, but I can’t wait for news from home, even the most ordinary stuff. Is Booker’s lacrosse team gelling? Did GT take that headhunting job? If so, what is headhunting?

The clerk finally returns with two letters: one from my grandmother, one from my mom.

“Nothing else?”

“Not today, Ms. Corrigan.”

My grandmother tells me that Slugger is still dating May, which hardly seems worth mentioning after almost three decades. The Orioles started playing in their new stadium. My parents came down for a lovely visit. Jesus loves me.

My mom, sounding like a proctor from a Dickens novel, asks how
the children
are. She doesn’t approve of “kids.”
Kids are goats, Kelly. Are they goats?
She gives me lots of updates, as requested. GT started a rock-and-roll band. Booker’s team is undefeated. She saw Amy at the Acme; she’s getting serious with a Penn grad named John. Charlie is still in Russia, doing some kind of banking thing. My mom loves Charlie because one time she
watched while he wagged his finger at me and said, “Your mom … your mom is the rudder.”

I sit outside the American Express office with my letters on my lap. The lineage between my mother’s handwriting and her mother’s is clear, same
Y
and
G
and
Q,
just the way the nuns taught them. They vote for the same people, shop in the same department stores, serve the same hors d’oeuvres, and whisper the same prayers to the same God at night. They buy the same cigarettes, and when they light up they have the same detached expression, as if they could give up smoking at the snap of a finger. And they like a clean, well-behaved child who doesn’t touch the furniture after it’s been polished.

There are a few critical differences
, my mom would rush to point out. Libby never drove a car. Not once. And unlike my mother, Libby had Josephine to clean and cook and do the laundry. Still, in matters that define, it’s a straight line from my grandmother to my mother.

The connections between my mom and me are more like the webs crisscrossing the Tanners’ driveway—flimsy and nearly invisible. In twenty-four years, there’s been one and only one person who thought our affinity was obvious: Sharon, the receptionist at my mother’s real estate office. Over my first Christmas break from college, my mom got me a job there answering phones. Six dollars an hour, five hours a day for two weeks—total gold mine.

“You must be Mary’s daughter,” said Sharon as I approached the front desk. “You look just like her!”

I don’t look anything like my mother. We have literally nothing in common.

When a man walked in, Sharon called out, “Jim! This is Mary’s daughter. Doesn’t she look just like her? Jim, look at her.
Doesn’t she look just like Mary?” Jim was head down in a contract of some sort.
“Your mother is the life of the office,” Sharon said to me, ignoring Jim ignoring her. “She’s hysterical.”

Hysterical? I’d started college four months ago. Could my mother have become hysterical in four months? Perhaps Sharon meant literally hysterical, as in unhinged. My dad had recently lost his job, and my mom was working again for the first time since her twenties. Maybe three college tuitions were making her hysterical. Or it might have been her empty nest. Maybe she was cracking under the invisible weight of new silence and empty space.