Charmed Thirds (30 page)

From the outside you can’t tell the difference between a Royale and a non-Royale because association rules dictate that each two-story town house must look exactly like every other unit: a boxy, two-story structure with gray vinyl siding, white shutters, and a redbrick front porch. So it was entirely possible that I’d gotten confused and had walked in on some other geriatrics getting their freak on. It wasn’t my parents after all! Whew!

I had all but convinced myself of this less nauseating reality when my mother came to the door in her robe, my father following close behind in a T-shirt and sweats.

“Jessie, honey,” she said, her voice straining for wholesome normalcy. “You came home early.”

And I was afraid to open my mouth, aware of how close I was to projectile vomiting on them. It was the most uncomfortable moment in my life, and any reader of the journal knows that this is saying quite a lot. Leave it to my mother to amp up the awkwardness to a whole new intolerable level.

“If we had known, we would have sped things up . . .”

“Moooooom.”
My bowels bellowed inside me. “Don’t say another word about it.”

“Since we moved in here it’s been like a second honeymoon!”

“But you’ve lived here since September!”

She sighed and brought her hand to her chest in a swoon. “I know.”

My knees buckled. I liked it so much better when I thought my parents were headed for divorce. “Dad! Make her stop! She’s killing me!”

My dad couldn’t look me in the eyes. “It’s obvious that Jessie is upset . . .”

“Upset? She should be happy!”

“I’m clinically dead,” I whimpered.

“You should be happy that you have parents who are not only still married, but still have a healthy and robust sex life.”

“Helen . . .”

“I’m a corpse,” I said, staggering across their gleaming floors to the guest room. “I can’t hear you anymore.”

As if my relationship with my parents wasn’t already on shaky ground. Without their money, I took the maximum twenty-two credits last semester in the hopes that I’ll be able graduate a semester early and save myself about $15,000 in loans. On top of this death wish of a class schedule, I worked two jobs. One was in the Psychology Department, cataloging narratives for the Storytelling Project, which means I was paid to watch the tapes and enter a brief description into a database, i.e.,

Name:
JESSICA
D.

Sex:
FEMALE

Race:
CAUCASIAN

D.O.B.:
1/19/1984

Occupation:
COLLEGE
STUDENT

Story category:
SEX

Synopsis:
WALKS
IN ON
PARENTS
ENGAGED
IN
SEXUAL
INTERCOURSE
AND
PERFORMS
OWN
CLITORIDECTOMY
WITH
PULL
TAB
FROM
COCA-COLA
CAN

This was a difficult job because I was constantly reminded of Bastian, who, thankfully, returned to his wife and kids in Spain. So the only awkward moments I suffered were inside my own head. Which was plenty enough.

The other job was at the I SCREAM!, a frozen confectionery near campus. I have to keep this a secret from my family because Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe hasn’t opened up a branch in Morningside Heights and working for a rival franchise would be considered an unforgivable betrayal. It was a logical choice, though, what with a summer’s worth of boardwalk experience in the industry. If the economy doesn’t improve and I am unemployable after graduation, I’ve always got my peerless scooping skills to fall back on. And as G-Money knows, custard and donuts are fail-safe.

So I’ve got
that
going for me.

And to think I survived this deadly workload, only to be murdered by the sight of my parents’ bare asses, a tragedy that gives a whole new meaning to the word
assassination.

the twenty-fifth

Christmas sucked. It
suuuuuuucked.
And it’s not even over yet, which means that there are still a few hours left in which my parents can explore the limits of suckiness.

First, the presents. Now, before you go off on how spoiled I am and how I should be grateful that my parents buy me presents at all, let it be known that I did not want any gifts. My parents (meaning, really, my mother) bought me presents because they (meaning she) never listen to me. I told my parents that all I wanted was money for next semester’s textbooks. When my mother refused (“Christmas gifts do not come in envelopes! They come in beautifully wrapped boxes! Don’t you have any sense of tradition?”), I sent her a wish list from cheapbooks.com. This morning I found out she summarily ignored that in favor of J.Crew’s entire winter catalog.

The moment of ironic truth came when, after opening box after bookless box, I reached in my Christmas stocking and pulled out . . . an envelope! I thought maybe, maybe, maybe it would contain a check, which would, if not quite
restore
my faith in my mother—because that would imply that there was once faith to begin with—but make me more optimistic about the future of our historically rocky relationship.

But no, it was not a check. It was a gift certificate to a spa.

“For a mother-daughter day of pampering!”

My hands were shaking with . . . shock. Rage. Malnutrition. Poverty.

“Not even a thank-you?” she asked.

“For what?” I asked, my voice quivering. “For something I didn’t ask for? For something I don’t want?”

“How could
anyone
not want a trip to a spa?”

“A day of beauty is so unnecessary in my financial situation! Did you know that I’ve recycled cans to afford the luxury of ordering something that isn’t on the McDonald’s Dollar Menu? Did you know that I’ve survived on nothing but ice cream and bagels for weeks at a time?”

“I thought . . . ,” my mom began.

“These gifts cost waaaaay more than the textbooks would have! For the cost of a day of beauty, you can feed a starving college student for a whole semester. So this wasn’t about not wanting to spend money. This is about teaching me a life lesson through beauty treatments and Fair Isle sweaters! Well, guess what? The only thing I’ve learned here is that you know less about me now than you ever did, which is something I never thought was even possible!”

“Jessie . . . ,” my dad began. But I ignored him and kept going.

“You do this all the time! You have this annoying habit of doing things behind my back, like clearing out my room or buying this new house. And when I don’t act all grateful for this thing I never wanted or asked for, you turn around and play the martyr saying, ‘But I did it all for yooooooooouuuuuuu. . . .’”

“Enough!” my dad barked. My mom’s face was in her hands. She has a fiftysomething’s hands. There’s very little you can do to take years, let alone decades, off your hands.

“I’ve had enough, too,” I said, and I stomped upstairs to the guest room that my mother has staged in a style that she describes as “city-country,” which reminds me of Shania Twain every time she says it, which is a lot. I flopped onto the dusky rose coverlet covering the white-painted brass daybed, gazing up at the lights twinkling on the wrought-iron chandelier. I thought about Martha Stewart’s daughter and how, at that moment, I was jealous of her. I daydreamed about a world in which my mother was incarcerated and it was a very peaceful place.

A few minutes into my reverie, I heard a knock at the door. It was my dad.

“Can I talk to you?”

“Sure,” I said. Though I couldn’t imagine what he had to tell me. We’ve never been very communicative, but we hadn’t exchanged a word since the assassination attempt.

He ducked under the chandelier and looked helplessly around the room for somewhere to sit. All the furniture was so tastefully distressed that I couldn’t blame him for doubting whether it would support his lanky frame. I scooted to one side of the daybed and he sat down on the other.

“You’ve really upset your mother.”

“I know. But can you see how she has upset me?”

He sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed his head. “I told her to buy the books.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

“Thanks for trying, Dad,” I said. “Really.”

“Do you know what she said?”

“That Christmas gifts come in boxes?”

“No,” he said. “She said that you’ve been working so hard at school that you deserve some R&R.”

I sunk into the velvet.

“But doesn’t she see that one day of pampering won’t do squat to relieve the stress of buying books? Or food?”

“No, she doesn’t,” my dad said matter-of-factly. “Your mother didn’t go to college, and she doesn’t understand what you’re taking on.”

“But I’ve tried to tell her!”

“She’s tough to get through to these days. Menopause is making her crazy.”

And then he went on to say that my mother is going through wild hormonal swings that are making her very difficult to live with.

“She’s almost as moody as
you
were in high school.”

And instead of being insulted, I felt a touch of pride. My dad’s comment not only implied that I had matured since then, but that he had noticed the change.

“I worked my way through college . . . ,” my dad began. And just when I was expecting another life lesson about the school of hard knocks, my dad handed me a check for $250. “I know how hard it is. I’m proud of you. And so is your mother, even if she shows it in strange ways. I hope this helps.”

“It does, Dad,” I said, tearing up. “It really does.”

And before I even got the impulse to hug him, he was up off the daybed, but not before cracking his head on the chandelier.

“I hate this damn thing,” he muttered.

Getting that check depressed me more than not having it at all. Because when my dad walked out, he left a lonesome void that no one else would fill. I was surprised by how much I wanted him to stay and talk to me about his college life that I know nothing about. It’s so strange how you can spend so much time with the people responsible for your very existence, yet know so little about them. Then again, how much do we ever know about anyone? Why should our parents be any exception?

No wonder suicides spike around the holidays. I’ve never felt more alone in my life. There’s no one around to commiserate with, which has made this holiday even more dismal than usual.

Bethany and G-Money aren’t here. Now that Marin is getting older, they’ve decided to perpetuate the Santa myth at their own home. This is the first time they haven’t so much as stopped by on Christmas Day, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Bethany chose this year to start a new tradition. As much as she’s supposedly supportive about their decision to “live for themselves” she has not adjusted well to the change of address. I don’t think it hit her until she saw 12 Forest Drive all packed up and empty.

“It’s like the end of my childhood,” she said wistfully. Which is weird, because you’d think that being a wife and mother would have done it already. I said as much to her.

“Here’s a secret, Jessie,” she said, leaning in. “You get older, but you don’t ever feel grown up.”

“You don’t feel grown up?” I asked.

“I feel more tired,” she said as she popped up to chase after Marin before she raced into the street. “People confuse the two.”

My grandmother Gladdie isn’t here because she’s dead. I frequently think of her, but especially around the holidays. I wonder what she would think about how I’m spending her inheritance. Spending my life.

Bridget isn’t here because she doesn’t live across the street anymore. But Bridget is just the latest example (Hope, and yes, Marcus . . .) of how location, location, location is not only the number one rule of real estate, but of relationships as well. Was it only a year ago that we said we’d
always
be friends, because it seemed unfathomable that we’d ever
not
live right across the street from each other? You would think that we would have seen a lot of each other since her transfer to
NYU
, but we haven’t. It’s incredible how localized one’s life can become in a city with arguably the best mass transit in the world. There’s life below Fourteenth Street (where she and Pepe are) and there’s life well above (where I am). And though it’s only a subway ride away, it’s a ride that we both (apparently) have been too lazy to make. I can only imagine that Bridget and Pepe are enjoying the benefits of cohabitation after spending so much time away from each other. See? Location, location, location.

Another part of it, I think, was that I don’t like the idea of trying to replace Dexy with Bridget. I feel like I’m always trying to substitute one lost best friend for another, like I tried to replace Jane with Dexy. They’re all just stand-ins for Hope, really, who is just so happy and well-adjusted at school that I’ve felt no need to intrude. She doesn’t need my negative influence on her very positive life, and she must agree because we’re
both
showing a mutual disregard of the Totally Guilt-Free Guidelines for Keeping in Touch.

I miss her. And yet I’m relieved that she doesn’t miss me.

the thirty-first

It seemed inappropriate to worry about returning my Christmas gifts when the tsunami has caused inconceivable suffering for hundreds of thousands of people half a world away. But it’s been more than a week now, and I’ve accepted that life in Pineville—such as it is—goes on and so should I. I wasn’t alone in my thinking because the mall was packed, especially for New Year’s Eve. Apparently, Americans turn to retail therapy for the answers to all their questions concerning the frailty of human existence.

This, of course, caused some inconveniences. Well, one inconvenience, really. An inconvenience by the name of Sara.

“Omigod! We’re both
quote
total losers
unquote!”
she said, cornering me outside J.Crew.

“Uh, yeah. With all the stuff going on in the world right now, I’m just too sad to go out this year . . .”