Glitter and Glue (9 page)

After two weeks, Evan and I are in a solid routine. It starts with
Santa Barbara
. I take some pride that the show’s stylists—who, we were alerted today, won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement for Hairstyling—do Eden’s hair like I do mine: a good solid hit of spray on the hair over the ears to keep it high off the cheeks, another blast to elevate the bangs. The rest is loose and natural. (Some part of your hair needs to move when you walk, or you look like an ass.)

“I reckon that’s it,” Evan says as today’s episode wraps. “Hey, you haven’t seen any hiking boots around here, have you?”

“No, sorry. John gets home in a couple hours—”

“John won’t know. I’m not John’s … problem.”

“Maybe Pop?”

On cue, Pop appears. “Look by the back door,” he says, handing Evan a pile of clean clothes: a folded scarf, a blue shirt with badges and epaulettes, a pair of wool socks with a red stripe, some yellowing cotton briefs that I wish I hadn’t seen. “I’ll have another load ready this afternoon,” Pop reports. I can’t help thinking about Greenie, who is the only other person I know who manages the laundry with this sort of devotional fervor. I don’t know how it started, but by the time I was old enough to notice, my dad did a load a day, folding it in front of whatever Eagles, Flyers, or 76ers game was on TV. Sometimes, when the hamper was light, my mother would lean in my bedroom
door and ask, with a genuine plea in her voice, “Do you have any clothes for your father? A towel? He’s dying to do a load.” She always said that a man needs a way to feel important around the house. I guess everyone already knows that mothers are irreplaceable.

“Thanks, Pop. Just in time,” Evan says.

Pop smiles, gratified. “Well, you have your jamboree this weekend, right?”

“
Quest
. Right. Thanks.”

While Evan takes his clothes out to his room, I flip through a booklet he left by the TV and realize that Evan is a Boy Scout. In Australia, it’s called Rovers, but I can tell by the photos in this booklet that it’s Scouting. Based on the chart, it looks like Evan is some kind of super Rover, like an Eagle Scout, which contradicts the image I’ve developed of him as lost and underemployed but clever enough to tackle a transmission.
EACH INDIVIDUAL IS THE PRINCIPAL AGENT IN HIS OWN DEVELOPMENT
, it says in bold letters across the bottom of every page. In the winter, there’s something called Snow Moot. In the spring, Mudbash. What if he wants to show me his photos from Snow Moot ’91? What if he asks me to be his date for Mudbash ’92?

Back in my room, where it’s dark enough to pass for midnight, I use a wood pole to push up the plywood that covers the skylight, wincing as I wiggle the board loose. Eventually, it sticks in place, letting the light fill the room. I stand back, thinking there must be a better way, something safer and more permanent … magnets, hinges, a hook. I add this to a list of Improvements to the Tanners that I’ve started in my journal.

By which I mean
Don’t get sucked in. Fix what you can and get back out there to the distant shores
.

The weekend is here, and thank God for that. I’ve been going crazy, padding around in the blue hush of the Tanners. It’s like living in a school library, the way we all tiptoe around, keeping conversation to a minimum. All week, I kept thinking of my brothers barreling through the back door, finding my mom and me in silence at the kitchen table, and saying, “Whoa, who died?”

At the pub, everyone’s talking about Euro Disney, which opened this week.

“I reckon that’s America’s biggest export—the big mouse,” our bartender says, tilting a pint glass under the tap. A guy with a shabby goatee drops the line that everyone’s quoting, that Euro Disney is “a cultural Chernobyl,” and I can tell by his tone that he thinks Americans are common philistines. “It’s basically intellectual pollution,” Goatee Boy says, looking at Tracy and me, waiting for a response.

A jolt of patriotism kicks in, and I can’t
let it lie
, as my mother would advise. “I read in the paper that they hired like twelve thousand people,” I say. “And, seriously, how evil can it be? It’s roller coasters and cotton candy.”

“Like Australia’s Wonderland!” the bartender jumps in, guiding us back to conviviality. Tracy orders two more beers—Budweisers this time—and we move to a communal table where we can roll our eyes and meet better people.

“To Donald Duck,” I say, raising my glass to hers.

“Cheers!”

In no time, we meet some boys, better boys, boys who agree that America and Australia are basically in-laws now that Tom Cruise married Nicole Kidman. We teach them to play Thumper, our favorite drinking game from college. People love making up signs and doing the motions and having to drain their beer every time they screw up. There’s a lot of flirting, all harmless. Around one
A.M.
, Tracy and I peel off and head back to the Tanners’.

Inching our way up the hill, we share the last cigarette, declaring it a Mega Night. In the unlit driveway, we walk quietly past Pop’s window and into a mesh of fresh spiderwebs. We’re covered in threads. We reach around for branches to break up the elaborate, invisible screen that secures the Tanner driveway at night. It’s been years since I went to a Haunted House but the correlation is immediate.

While we brush our teeth, Tracy says, “Don’t you hate it when people take digs at America?”

“Bugs the crap out of me,” I say through a mouthful of toothpaste. “I don’t even care if some of it’s true.” I spit toothpaste foam into the running water.

Before this year, I’d barely considered what it meant to be an American, other than my mother’s dictate that good Americans buy U.S. products made on U.S. soil by U.S. workers. (For the bulk of my childhood, she piloted a wood-paneled Chevy wagon, flinging dirty looks at anyone behind the wheel of a Toyota or a Honda.
Honestly, who do they think gets their money and what do they think they’re doing with it?
)

Around Main Line Philadelphia, my association with my mother felt unfavorable, unbearable, and, considering she was as beyond my control as American foreign policy, unfair. But
when I was in middle school, the very zenith of self-consciousness, a nervy boy named Harry Morrison who liked to hang around my brothers but didn’t like my mother’s house rules (and wasn’t afraid to give her the finger behind her back) took a potshot at her, and a dormant allegiance rose in me.

One night when no one was around, Harry Morrison took a can of black spray paint to the concrete underpass leading to our street and wrote in giant letters:

I read the announcement twice before I understood what it meant. “Oh my God, Mom.”

“That’s nice,” she said coolly as we drove past it.

“That’s YOU.”

“Sticks and stones, Kelly. We don’t worry about that sort of thing.”

I
worried about that sort of thing. I was thirteen; that was pretty much all I worried about. What did people think about me? What did they think of my mother—her nylon sweatsuit, her frosted hair, the way she cracked her gum? Last and most important, did what they thought of my mother make them think less or more of me?

“What are you going to do about it?” I asked, my voice shrill with panic.

“Absolutely nothing.”

Some
foul-mouthed
kid who didn’t like to be told to clean up his language or go home? Who wasn’t invited to stay for dinner after rolling his eyes at her? That kid and his graffiti tantrum didn’t bother my mother
one iota
.

In a matter of days, the message was covered by a sloppy black rectangle, but when the sun angled in, you could still see our address. On bad days, when I’d had a blowup with my mother over cutting my hair in her bathroom and clogging her sink, or using a certain dismissive tone with her that she
wouldn’t use to talk to a criminal
, I’d think maybe Harry Morrison had it right. More often, I felt a strange, powerful mix of pity and chemical anger. It was my first taste of protective wrath, the kind that only mothers are said to possess.

It’s still dark when Milly wakes up. I can hear her out there opening cabinets, so I roll out of bed and head to the kitchen.

“Hi,” I say, turning on the overhead light.

“Hi.”

“Want some toast?”

“No.”

“Oatmeal?”

“No.”

“Cereal?”

She sits down and looks at her reflection in the kitchen window. “My hair isn’t long enough.”

“What? I love your hair.”

“It’s ugly, and it won’t stay up.”

“I can braid it. I can French-braid it. Have you ever tried that?” She shakes her head. “Well, if you want, get a hairbrush and a ponytail holder, and I’ll see what I can do.”

My mom and I did not do this sort of thing. She had neither the inclination nor, as far as I know, the skill for hair design, and she was on high alert for vanity’s handmaidens: blow dryers, hot curlers, special bands and accessories. The only exception I can recall was the night before my First Communion, when she told me to take a shower and meet her in her bathroom. She had a vision. I did as I was told and reported to her door. She led me
in, sat me on the counter, and for the next fifteen minutes labored over me, slowly dividing my wet hair into sections, twirling the sections into tiny buns, clipping the buns to my head with two silver hairpins crisscrossed. We did not talk, but I knew she was happy because she made the same satisfied working noises she made when she polished silver or pulled flagging leaves off her potted plants, and because I saw her face in the mirror as she wrapped my head under one of her many navy blue/kelly green scarves and she was grinning. In the morning, she slipped out the pins two by two, and then it was time to shake out the curls.
Voilà!
she said. I put on my flouncy dress and buckled my hard, shiny shoes and stood in front of my mom, who looked at me and nodded. I could have tap-danced all the way to St. Thomas of Villanova, her attention made me so giddy. On the ride to church, I stared at myself in the side-view mirror, going on about my perfect hairdo as I ran my finger in and around the curl closest to my ear, until my mother turned around, her expression firm.
Remember, Kelly, today is about the good Lord, so let’s focus our thoughts on Jesus and Mary
. She had gotten carried away and she regretted it.

When Milly comes back, I take her to my room, sit her on the floor between my knees, and brush through her shampoo-commercial hair, careful not to pull or rip a single strand, nothing that might make her repeal the privilege. She’s given me a chance to solve a problem, and if I can do it—if I can make her like herself again—we will be closer.

I begin her braid and it builds into the perfect repeating weave of a Goodyear tire. There are no bumps, no sticky-outies. She wants to see. I open my closet door and turn her shoulders so she can admire her reflection in the mirror.

“I like it.”

“I’m glad,” I say, enjoying a rush of whatever hormones make you feel good as I tie it off with a pink rubber band.

“Yeah, I like it,” she says again.

“Good.”

“Can you do it again tomorrow?”

Tomorrow and every day after. “Sure.”

“Okay, good.” And she runs out of my room, touching the braid, looking for someone to show.

I turn around, flush with satisfaction and optimism. I can do this. I can help this girl. I can uncover every way there is to make her happy, to make her say
mmm
. Buy her pretty barrettes, keep her up late watching movies, have the Emmas over for a three-day party.

But then, on my dresser, I see a box of tampons, and I’m stopped short. Who will tell Milly about periods? That’s no kind of work for a father. But who else will be here all those years from now to steer her through the fun house of puberty? Who will sit Milly down, as my mother did with me, and say, “I want you to know … well, I want to ask you … do you have any questions … about
anything
?”