Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend (4 page)

He shakes his head.
“Then what?” This roller coaster is making me insane.
“I wasn’t gonna do that—”
“Don’t bother, Jamie. You don’t have to explain—”
“I do. There’s a lot of stuff I gotta explain,” he says, his eyes
locked onto mine.
The fact that he knows he owes you some explanations means something.
My anger starts to deflate.
But where the hell was he all summer? Did it take him months to come up with these explanations he
claims he now has?
My anger balloons up again.
Well, so what if it
did? Not everybody knows how to explain how they feel. You have to
cut people slack sometimes.
Now my anger just sits still, not knowing what to do. Suddenly I find the entire situation…funny.
“Did you just say you’re going to explain something to me?
Seriously?” I tease. “You mean, I’m
finally
going to get some actual explanations out of Jamie Forta?”
After a moment of what looks like confusion, a little smile
crosses his face, and I feel a shift. I don’t know how to explain it
in a normal way. It’s like we’ve always been standing on two different levels, with him above me. But just now, the levels moved
closer to each other and we’re not so far apart anymore. We’re
almost—but not quite—on equal ground.
I guess another way to say it is that Jamie doesn’t hold all the
cards. I actually have a few of my own, and I like it.
“Next Saturday,” he says.
Next Saturday. Next Saturday? As in, Saturday night?
“Dinner,” he adds.
Last year, Jamie and I had covert conversations in his car in
various locations, hidden away. But we never spent any time together around other people.
“Are you finally going to be seen with me in public?” I say,
pretending to be astonished. “We better not tell anyone or we’ll
both end up in jail this time.”
His smile gets a little wider and he actually laughs—that beautiful, delicious laugh that feels like a reward whenever it’s let out.
It practically makes me giddy. And it dawns on me that Jamie
likes it when I make fun of him. That’s why the playing field is
leveling out. Because I’m teasing him.
“I can’t believe it,” I say. “Jamie Forta and me, on an actual
date.”
“You don’t have to keep saying
Jamie Forta,
Rose.”
“Oh, sure I do. In these big moments, when explanations are
being promised and public outings are announced, it’s important to address you by your full name. The occasion calls for it.”
His smile makes me want to get into his car and go anywhere
with him. It’s a little intimidating to feel that for someone. It
makes you wonder if you’re going to do something you don’t
really want to do, or shouldn’t do. I mean, I haven’t seen or talked
to Jamie in months, and after one kiss and a couple of moments
of me being really mad, I’m ready to have his hands on my bare
skin again. Because that was amazing. That felt like…everything.
But I guess the point is, even though I’m feeling what I’m feeling, I’m
not
getting in the car with him. Although, why is that? Is
that just because it’s late at night and I’m staying at my friend’s
house and I don’t want to get in trouble with her parents, or get
her
in trouble? Or is it actually because I have enough respect for
myself not to drive off in the middle of the night with the guy
who didn’t bother to call me all summer?
I push off the car to show him—and myself—that I’m going
back inside now.
“I’ll call you,” he says.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” 2.0 answers. I feel all sassy as I
walk past him, even though what I said doesn’t exactly make
sense—you don’t really
see
someone call you. But I don’t care.
I look over my shoulder and Jamie’s still smiling, looking at me
like he’s seeing me in a different way. A new way. A way he likes.
It was worth torturing myself all summer long just for that
one look.

What I want to say is,
the issue is that I should be eating Saturdaymorning pancakes with my best friend and telling her about what happened with Jamie last night, not sitting on a therapist’s couch with my
mother for Saturday-morning therapy.
But I’ve already been told
that sarcasm has no place here.

Caron’s office is nicer than my mother’s. The couch is squishier, the tissues are softer and the view of the backyard is more interesting. The room smells a little bit like wet dog, but I like dogs,
so I don’t care that much. Not that I’ve ever seen Caron’s dog. I
hear it snuffling around on the other side of the door every once
in a while, but that’s it. For all I know, it’s just a tape of a dog, and
the smell is some kind of weird incense—my mom says therapists do all sorts of things to their offices to make their clients
feel comfortable. Even all the neutral colors serve a purpose—
they’re supposed to keep patients focused.

From my point of view, the only thing wrong with Caron’s
black-and-brown-and-cream office is what goes on inside it.
What
has
been going on inside it every other Saturday—or sometimes more often, depending on the level of drama in the house—
since June.

“The issue?” I repeat, trying to prove to them that I’ve barely
been listening.
“The
problem,
” Caron says, stressing the word
problem
as if I
need a synonym for
issue.
If she thinks I’m confused about the
meaning of the word
issue
rather than just plain old baffled that
we have to hash this topic out yet again, she’s clearly forgotten
my father, who she knew well. Dad started using vocabulary
flashcards with Peter and me before we could talk.
Caron and my mother actually look like they could be sisters. They are both tall with dark brown hair and light blue
eyes, and they’re skinny and wear what I think of now as shrink
clothes—earth tones that blend into the office furniture, with
a colorful necklace or scarf. Maybe it’s a kind of uniform. They
both wear tortoise-shell glasses—my mom’s spend a lot of time
on her head functioning as a headband, but Caron’s are always
on her face. The difference between them these days is their energy, I guess you would say. Caron is calm; my mother seems
totally wired, like she’s fighting really hard to stay in control of
things. Things like me.
“Do you understand why your mother has a problem with the
memorial website?” Caron asks. “Why she wants you to take it
down?”
I know that I’m supposed to say yes—after all, we’ve been
going around and around on this topic all summer long. And
I could just do that, because technically, I do understand the
problem. I did something very public, and I did it without Mom’s
permission, using private family photos of Dad. But I don’t understand why having a website in Dad’s honor makes her so crazy.
I thought she’d be happy when she saw all the photos I scanned
and uploaded, and all the quotes I posted, and the Word of the
Day section featuring his favorite words of all time.
But she wasn’t happy. She was pissed. And when she realized that I didn’t really care that she was pissed, and that if she
wanted the website taken down she was going to have to figure
out how to do it herself—all hell broke loose.
I think what freaks my mom out the most about the site is that
it’s an open invitation for people to express their opinions. I run
the site, and I can make changes to it, but I have no say in how
people respond. And it turns out that there are all sorts of people who knew Dad well, and they have things to say about him.
Mom doesn’t like that, because she can’t control what they write.
Which, of course, is exactly why I
do
like it.
“Rose, are you still with us?” Caron asks. She usually gives
me about three seconds to think before she makes a comment
implying that I’m not paying attention.
“I guess I don’t really get it, no,” I lie.
“The problem, Rose,” my mother says, her overt patience communicating just how impatient she is with this conversation, “is
that you went behind my back after I specifically asked you not
to, and you got Peter involved by using his credit card.”
“Can you tell Rose how that made you feel?”
“Betrayed. Betrayed at a very vulnerable moment.”
I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I know that would probably
also be betraying my mother at a very vulnerable moment. It’s
not that I don’t care that she feels betrayed, it’s just that I think
her reasons for feeling that way are ridiculous.
Maybe that’s the same thing as not caring. I’m not sure.
“It also scares me,” she continues. “There are a lot of people
out there who prey on those who are grieving. And Rose is now
having interactions with people she’s never even heard of before,
who claim to know her father. It’s dangerous in many ways, including emotionally.”
“Can you explain to Rose what you mean by that?”
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.
That’s Shakespeare for
here we go again.
“Rose launched the website on the anniversary of her dad’s
death in June. Within a few hours, there were nearly fifty comments on the site about him. Some were nice, some were odd,
some were from people who obviously didn’t know Alfonso at
all and just wanted to make themselves feel important and involved. It would have been extremely confusing and painful for
anyone, but it was especially so for a teenage girl missing her
father. Rose didn’t leave her room for three days.”
That’s not entirely true. I left to use the bathroom and to eat
occasionally.
“I was just reading the comments and writing back to people,”
I say. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“That’s part of what you were doing, Rose. You were also having an emotional breakdown as a result of being assaulted by all
the information that didn’t reflect back to you the person you
thought you knew—”
“Kathleen,” says Caron in her special voice. This is some kind
of code they’ve established, because every time Caron says her
name like that, my mother looks guilty and then stops talking.
So what if I’m in touch with people we don’t know who knew
Dad? So what if some guy he knew for, like, two days in Iraq
posted about how they’d had a beer together and how he could
tell that Dad was the “genuwine article”? Why is that less valid
than my story about him showing me his twenty-volume Oxford
English Dictionary for the first time?
I don’t really know how Kathleen and I got here. I feel like
things were fine, and then suddenly they weren’t. We had this
heart-to-heart conversation last year on my birthday and it
seemed like everything was finally going to be okay between
us. She apologized for “abandoning me to my grief,” explained
that she needed help and asked if I would come to therapy with
her. I said I’d think about it.
What a mistake that was. Two months later, I launched my
dad’s site and when I refused to take a shower after sitting in
front of the computer for a few days, she practically dragged me
by my greasy hair to see Caron for the first time.
“So, Rose, when you hear your mother talk about feeling betrayed by you and scared for you, what do you feel?”
This question has come up before, but I guess I didn’t answer
it right. Maybe I’ll try telling the truth today.
“I feel annoyed,” I answer. This is a very different response
from my usual
I feel bad.
Caron’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Annoyed?” my mother repeats very slowly.
“I don’t understand why we have to keep talking about this.
It’s starting to get
annoying.
”
“We have to keep talking about it because you refuse to take
the site down, even though you are unable to explain why you
want to keep working on it when it clearly upsets you to be in
touch with those people.”
Those people.
She means Vicky.
I just got an email from Vicky this morning, reminding me to
have fun on my last free weekend before school starts on Tuesday. Vicky checks in on me from time to time, emailing me little inspirational sayings or pictures that she’s scanned as part
of her ongoing project to scan every photo she ever took with a
pre-digital camera. She only sends me funny photos of herself,
like from Halloween or from some party where she did something big and crazy with her hair. Vicky is from Texas, and she’s
a hairdresser, so she’s had a lot of practice making big hair. Every
time she sends me a new photo, it’s the biggest hair I’ve ever
seen. When I told her I had the lamest, flattest, straightest, most
boring-est hair in the history of humankind, she said I needed
to “hightail it on down” to Texas and let her take a crack at it.
“When I’m done with you, honey,” she wrote, “you won’t even
recognize yourself.”
Vicky raised her son—the sergeant, Travis—and daughter
alone. A “good, single Christian woman” is how she describes
herself. She’s never told me anything about the father of her
children, although I read a letter Travis’s dad wrote to him that
she posted on the website. And she doesn’t say much about her
daughter. I kind of get the feeling that she and her daughter don’t
talk much. But she loves to write about Travis, and she always
ends every email with,
Your dad is watching over you, just like my
Travis is watching over me. God bless, honey.
I was raised agnostic, bordering on atheist, but there’s something about the way Vicky writes
God bless, honey
that makes me
feel safe from all the awful stuff that goes on inside my head and
out. When Vicky says she’s praying for me, I believe it, and even
though I don’t think there’s a god who pays attention to us, I like
when she says it because I know she
does
think he’s up there.
Of course I can’t tell any of that to my mother.
“It doesn’t upset me to be in touch with
those people.
Why do
you hate Vicky so much, anyway?” I ask.
Kathleen sighs like she’s the weariest person in history. “I
don’t even know Vicky, Rose. I just feel like you give her more
than she gives you. And frankly, you don’t need to take care of
anyone but yourself right now.”
“Rose, do
you
feel like you’re taking care of Vicky?” Caron
asks me. My mother looks at her sharply. Caron, to her credit,
keeps her eyes on me and doesn’t acknowledge the death rays
that Kathleen is staring at her.
“We just email about stuff. She sends me funny pictures of
her hair. Is that taking care of somebody—sending each other
emails?”
“It is when she’s sharing private details regarding how she’s
coping with the death of her son,” my mother cuts in, sounding
jealous and protective at the same time. “She’s a grown woman.
She shouldn’t be burdening a child with her feelings under the
guise of helping her.”
“I’m not a child, Kathleen,” I say.
I clamp my hand over my mouth. I had no intention of calling
my mother “Kathleen” to her face. Well, no conscious intention,
anyway. I can’t imagine that it’s going to go over well.
My mother’s face changes color several times and I feel like
steam is about to come out of her ears but she’s doing her best
not to lose it. I actually feel bad. I didn’t do it on purpose. It just
came out.
It probably hurts to hear your child call you by your first name,
although I can’t really say why.
But why do I have to worry about
her
feelings?
Because there’s such a thing as basic human kindness,
says one of
the voices in my head.
Caron is watching my mother to see if she wants to address
what just happened. When it’s clear that my mother is taking the
high road, Caron asks, “Is it easy to write to Vicky about how
you’re feeling, Rose?”
I don’t like having to talk about Vicky in here like she’s an
issue.
“I don’t think about it—I just do it. She asks me questions and I answer them, and then I ask her questions. I don’t
see what’s wrong with that. She’s just a sad woman with a dead
son. And I’m a ‘depressed’ girl with a dead dad.”
My mother closes her eyes and twists her wedding ring on
her finger. Then she finally says, “Please don’t talk about your
father that way.”
“What way? He’s dead, so I get to say that he’s dead. Isn’t the
whole reason we’re here so we can say whatever we want out
loud?”
“It’s the way you’re saying it, Rose. You’re saying it in a way
that is disrespectful to your father and designed to shock and
hurt me. And I know why you’re doing it—”
“Kathleen,” Caron says again, with a little more force than
before.
This time my mother is the one to roll her eyes, which I think
is pretty funny. I guess she’s sick of Caron telling her what she
can and can’t say. She stares out the window into the backyard
and looks…hopeless.
“Why do you keep stopping her from talking if we’re supposed
to be so open?” I ask Caron. Mom looks at me.
“Sometimes it’s difficult for your mother to be a patient, which
means things get a little uneven—”
“Rose, just tell me why it’s important to you to keep that website up, even though it could send you into a tailspin at any moment,” my mother interrupts, obviously not liking where Caron
is going. I see a flicker of annoyance on Caron’s face.
I know it seems to my mom and to Caron that I’m keeping
this information from them, but I just haven’t come up with the
right way to tell the truth yet. For example, if I said, “Sometimes
the site feels like my only connection to Dad,” Kathleen might
ask why
she
isn’t that connection for me. I don’t know how to
answer that without hurting her. Also, when I was building the
website, I liked that it was a way for me to connect with Dad directly, not through her or anyone else. And when I launched it
and all those people started posting things, it became my favorite
way to connect to him. And I definitely can’t say that.
So I go with the easiest answer. “It’s important to me to keep
the site up because I’m learning things about Dad that I didn’t
know before.”
My mother is so frustrated by this that she can barely stay
seated on the couch. “What could you possibly learn about your
father from people who barely knew him?” she snaps.
I snap right back. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that he
was going to stay in Iraq for a whole year.”
Her irritation turns to shock. She shakes her head and then
says to Caron, “See? This is exactly the kind of information Rose
shouldn’t be getting out of context.”
“Kathleen, you’re shutting Rose out of the conversation. Tell
her, not me.”
Mom stares at the ceiling for a few seconds before she turns
to me and tries to ask very calmly, “Who told you that?”
“Not you. And not him,” I mutter. “He told me he was only
staying for six months.”
“There wasn’t time to tell you,” Mom says, tears filling her
eyes. “He made the decision right before it happened. Who told
you?” she asks again.
“One of the guys he worked with. He wrote that he was glad
when Dad said he’d signed up to stay for more time because
playing chess with Dad was one of the only things that made
life there bearable.”
My mother starts shaking her head again. “He felt like it was
worth it financially, Rose. Adults have to take all sorts of factors
into consideration when making decisions.”
I know that my mother feels guilty about encouraging my dad
to take the contractor job in Iraq. And I also know that she encouraged him to do it because he’d lost his job as an engineer,
the money in Iraq was really good and she’d been freaking out
about their finances because of college tuition. The nice and
smart and generous thing to do would be to let the matter drop.