Future Perfect (17 page)

“That's not true,” I say, lurching forward, and Grandmother snorts, an undignified sound that she somehow makes elegant.

“Enough, Ashley. Loyalty is lovely,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “And fairy tales are useful for children but it's the truth that's more important now. I have taught you to value the truth.”

“Are you saying that—you've been lying to me. For all this time.” I am up on my feet and my entire head feels like it is burning. Nothing is right anymore. My mother is a stranger and I am an idiot and my grandmother is suddenly in my face and her voice is deadly.

“Sit. Down. Now.”

I drop. I could not stay standing if I wanted to. I have never heard her say these things and I want to make her stop.

None of it is true. I have the proof. I have the photo of my mother—young, smiling—sitting on the lawn in front of Harvard Law School. A student. I want to make fists and shout, to push my grandmother back and make her just stop talking but I only sit there, and she keeps going.

“I let your mother live in my house. I gave her a home despite the fact that I had forbidden your father to marry her. A home. For your brothers. For
you
. Do you understand that?” She raises a dark eyebrow at me. She looks young and almost soft in this light and with her hair down. She looks nothing like her voice.

She leans forward, catching my eyes. She won't let me look away. “But oh, she was ungrateful. She continually defied me. She continually turned her back on the values I raised your father with,” she says. “And then she turned her back on
you
. Because you were too much effort to actually raise properly.” Her words are bladed and rusty and dripping blood while they're carving through to their point.

I don't say anything. I am staring at her and I can't look away. She takes the saucer sitting on the table at her elbow and she lifts her teacup to her lips.

“She wanted to name you Mariposa,” she says conversationally. She shakes her head slightly.

“What?” I flinch at that. More things I don't want to hear.

She frowns and tilts her head. “I never liked ‘Mateo' and ‘Lucas,' of course, but I didn't have the opportunity to say so. For
you, she wanted Mariposa.” That slight head shake again. “I put my foot down. Ridiculous name.”

“I—I didn't know,” I say numbly.

“Imagine, her naming you
butterfly
, and then you growing up to—this.” She gestures at my body, and I flinch again. “I have been looking out for you since
before you were born
, my darling.”

I look down at myself, the rumpled tank and my boobs spilling out the top and the strap stretched out and falling down my arm and the width of my lap and the broadness of my knuckles and I see what she's saying. I'm living inside what she's saying. My gift from my mother.

“And now you're acting like you've been raised by her.” She sighs. “Pretty girls like that Laura can get away with it, darling. Not you.”

I drop my head. I don't know when I started crying, but there are tears sliding off my chin and my cheeks are wet with them.

She says, “I see you have my point.”

I'm dizzy. I don't answer.

She sets her teacup and saucer back down. “Your mother could not, as they say, get her act together.” She clasps her hands on her knee. “Can you? Or are you as bad as she was?”

I don't answer.

“You are not like her, Ashley. You are better. You are stronger. You have me in you.” She looks at me again, a more kindly survey of my body that doesn't feel less painful. “Shower,”
she says. “Sleep. We are going out to select your interview clothes this afternoon.”

I lift my head. “My interview,” I say.

“Your Harvard interview,” she says. She gestures at her desk, and I stare at her. “Get up and get the envelope,” she says.

The envelope is addressed to me, torn open. The letter says,
following up on our email earlier this week, we'd like to invite you to meet with a Harvard alumnus as the next step in your application
and then it blurs and washes out and I drop the note.

“Okay,” I say. The only thing I can think is,
I thought
my mother had an interview at Harvard
.
My mother never had an interview at Harvard.

“Do you see why I was so worried about you? Do you see why I was so angry? You can't jeopardize your future. You're so close.”

I'm staring at the letter on the floor.

“Go,” she says, and I turn and walk down the hall and down the stairs and into the bathroom and I sit on the closed toilet and realize that the last thing I can do right now is strip down naked. I leave the bathroom. My bedroom is already bright, and the scarves draped over the curtain rod are stirring in the breeze coming through the window, tinting the light pink. I climb into bed fully clothed, burrowing under all the blankets and dragging the pillow over my head and doing my damnedest to not think of anything at all until it gets so easy because everything goes dark.

Everyone has the same anxiety dreams. You've missed a test, or you suddenly realize you've forgotten to go to class all year and the final is right now and you're late because it's in an entirely different wing of the building you've never been to and it's filled with monkeys and you can't graduate unless you take this test and get it one hundred percent correct, every question, and all of them are written in hieroglyphics. Or you've lost the dogs, all of them, they've all gotten out the front door because you left it open and they've scattered across the neighborhood and it's getting dark and they are lost and alone and it is your fault. Or that your grandmother is a zombie and she is faster than you and smarter and her basic instinctual drive is pushing her forward relentlessly and you are in an endless hallway of wooden doors and every door is locked and she's right behind you with the floorboards shrieking your name under every one of her heavy footfalls.

Classic.

I fling the covers off and drag myself up and look at the window, still bright. I can't tell what time it is. My phone is in the car, right.
And I am filthy,
I think, looking at the trails of greasy dirt streaking down my arms. I drag all the sheets and pillows and blankets off the bed with me, because they will need to be washed at least twice, and sneak across the hall into the bathroom and run the water hot. The water stings my foot and I scrub it clean,
wincing but not caring. I am fast and quick and I put my hair in a wet ponytail, even though I know grandmother hates that but she'd hate that I was late even more, and I wish I had pants that weren't jeans or a top that wasn't a T-shirt or something low cut, but I settle on something plain and black and closed-toe flats because haven't my feet suffered enough.

Grandmother doesn't say anything when I come downstairs and she's silent in the car. She is all straight angles, elegantly geometrical, and she is hard to look at directly. We pull into the parking spot in front of Lane Bryant and she sighs. She hates this store. I hate this store. Laura thinks this store is an abomination. But my grandmother is ruthlessly efficient. She walks past all the hangers and the mannequins wearing clothes that are floaty, printed, sporting an empire waist, contrasting trim, embellished with lace or sequins or sparkling threads or strange buttons or—any of the thousands of things that fat-clothes designers want fat girls to wear because maybe enough shiny, sparkly, ruffly bits will fool the eye into thinking you're not actually fat.

My grandmother knows how to strike at the heart of things. She finds slacks that don't have a tuxedo stripe down the side or Lurex pinstripes or an attached brass belt studded with jewels. She glances at me and takes the 16s, the 18s, and the 20s off the rack and I hold my breath but she takes the 22s as well and something about that feels like betrayal. Like the problem isn't my weight or her worry about me and my future or my potential. The problem
is that she doesn't see me. She doesn't see my body as more than a problem and I am there lost in it, standing next to her in a hushed, dimly lit carpeted cavern that seems huge but I remember the Forever 21 in San Francisco, the marble mansion full of clothes for girls who have single digits in their size numbers and nothing holding them back.

She holds out her stack of pants and I take them all and wrap them up in my arms and follow behind her, letting her flip through all the blouses that become indistinguishable from one another. They all look like shirts to me in sizes that might fit me, which is strange because I have never felt quite so small.

A woman peeks around the side of a clothes rack and says, “Hi there! My name is Flora! Can I help you find anything?”

My grandmother looks her up and down and seems very discouraged. Flora is a fat girl as brown as me, dressed in the floatiest pink-and-yellow watercolor top with a keyhole neck tied at the top in a bow and the beaded ends disappearing into her amazing cleavage. Her skirt swirls around her ankles in burgundies and greens when she steps around the rack and clasps her hands in front of her and smiles at us.
Pink toenails,
I think numbly for no reason. Her sandals are bronze.

“I am not convinced,” my grandmother says.

“I'm sorry?” Flora says, dipping her head down a bit like she's tryng to get close enough to hear.

“My granddaughter has an interview at Harvard,” Grandmother
says. “We need a suit. Something that isn't frivolous.”

Flora says to me, “Well congratulations!” and I almost say thank you but my grandmother interrupts with, “She hasn't gotten in yet.”

“It's just an interview,” I mumble.

“Well that's still just great,” she says. “We have a ton of suiting separates right back here.” She turns and waves us along behind. My grandmother runs her eyes across the few racks and nods, but Flora doesn't recognize being dismissed. “Well, see, here there are a ton of options and if you can't find your size I'll be happy to help you figure something out. I'll just set up a fitting room for you right now and then you can get to work.”

“Thank you,” I say to her. Grandmother is flipping through the racks already, ignoring both of us. Soon I'm loaded up with one of every size of every piece in this section. I duck into the room but my grandmother is right behind me, and she places herself on the padded stool in the corner.

“I can try on things myself,” I say to her. “I'll come out and show you.”

“This is more efficient,” she says. “Go on.”

I turn my back when I lift my shirt and it feels like I am peeling off my skin, leaving behind raw red hamburger that hurts in the open air. I start at the smaller sizes and go up and I don't look in the mirror, I look at my grandmother who does not say a word to me, just shakes her head or nods and in the end, we have
two pairs of pants, two jackets, four button-down shirts.

I bang open the door of the dressing room. “Ashley,” my grandmother says sharply but I keep going, pushing through the front doors and breathing the hot afternoon air. It doesn't feel as hot as the skin all over my body. Or the tears streaming out of the corners of my eyes. I try rubbing them away with the heels of my hands before my grandmother can see but I can't keep up.

When she comes out I don't know how many minutes later she smiles at me. She doesn't say anything about my red wet face. She just hands me the bag and goes around the side and unlocks the car. All the way home I sit with the bag in my lap and she talks about how we can salvage this and I don't ask “salvage what,” but I nod and say
yes
and make noises similar to
yes
but I can't really hear her
.

When we pull into the driveway, she turns the key and the car gets immediately too hot with the sun beating down on the windshield. She turns to me and says, “That reminds me! For when shall I schedule the pre-operative appointment?”

All of me wants to pretend that I have no idea what she's talking about but I am not stupid or twelve.

“I don't know,” I say. “I don't want to—”

She pats my hand. “I know, darling,” she says. “It is hard to let go of old, wrong ideas. Especially for someone as stubborn as you.” She smiles at me. “You get that from me.” She checks her lipstick in the rearview mirror, and then smiles at me again.
“You finally know how important this is. You're better than your mother ever was, and I am determined to give you every possible advantage.” She opens her door and slips out, taps up the stone path in her kitten heels.

I haven't promised anything,
I think.
I haven't promised anything.
I follow behind her with the bag in my arms, tripping up the stairs and into the dark coolness of the house.

I
'm surprised at how glad I am to see Hector's face peering around the giant potted palms that separate the foyer from the rest of the restaurant. Relieved. We've never gone so long without talking. I have wanted badly to call him, to confess to him, tell him about San Francisco, about this new version of my mother I've had to carry around in my head, that I've been shying away from—that she didn't leave because she was too good for us. She left because she wasn't good enough.

But I have been fighting the urge to call because I need to know that I am enough on my own. I can't let him be my center support. I have never noticed before how much I had relied on him to see all of me and still love me and ratify who I am. It scares me.

It's the busiest time of the Sunday rush though, the four-o'clock early-dinner crowd full of seniors and parents with kids they want to get into bed in a couple of hours. I lift my pitcher of
water in a salute to him, and he smiles when he sees me. Dimples.

Water runs down my arm and on to Mr. Monroe's bread plate, but he doesn't notice because he's focused on buttering another piece of sourdough. I am tired and my feet hurt and I'm trying to let the orders I need to remember crowd out everything else but that never works the way you want it to.

“Amy,” I say to the server at the next table over. “Amy,” I say again, and she startles and swings around.

“Hi. What,” she says. She looks like a mushroom to me, with a triangle of hair and a soft square face that never changes expression.

“I'll be right back, okay?” I say. I try to hand her the water pitcher, but she just looks at it. “Can you take this?” I say. “I'm just going to be a second.”

“No,” she says, and turns back to her table full of sunburned tourists, all peeling and dressed like they've been standing on a boat letting the sea air blow through their clothes.

I know if I look at any of my tables someone is going to try and catch my eye so I keep my head down and sidle among all of them, dripping water all the way across the carpet. Hector is examining the leaves of the palm tree, pinching the ends as if he is trying to determine whether they're real, and looking like he's going to pull off one entirely.

“Don't mess with the palm tree,” I say to him, but he doesn't laugh at me. He is not even smiling anymore. His face is so still
and serious that he looks like a bad photograph of himself. “What is it,” I say. I don't think I've ever seen him look sad. That's what this expression is, and it catches me off guard.

“I was going to text you,” he says. “I'm sorry.” He swallows and his throat bobs. I want to touch the side of his neck where it meets his shoulder, that cord of muscle, but I am still holding a water pitcher.

“You mean what happened at lunch on Thursday? It's fine. I haven't been thinking about it.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sort of.”

I glance over my shoulder and I see Amy staring at me as she deals out the bread bowls for one of my tables. “Do you want to talk after work?” I say. I should be walking the dogs and cleaning the kitchen and finishing a paper for Literature, not wandering off again, but I shove that thought away.

“No,” he says. “I can't wait that long. I went to your house but your grandmother said you were working and I had to talk to you.” He still hasn't smiled and he's not looking at me and he is the most transparent person I've ever known.

“Are you breaking up with me?” I say.

Relief like the dawning of the sun across his face, then sadness chasing after it. “You're not happy,” he says, and I am silent. “You know, I just want you to be happy. But you aren't and I don't want to hang around making you more unhappy.”

I am still holding the water pitcher. He is looking at me very
earnestly. He says, “Say something.”

“Okay,” I say. My grandmother's voice in my head:
Why are you surprised? He's finally woken up. Isn't this what I've been telling you all along?
“What did I do?”

“You didn't do anything,” he says. “It wasn't anything you did.”

“Okay,” I say. I am standing there in my apron and there is sweat in my cleavage and Hector is breaking up with me. It's nothing I said. It was nothing I did. It's me.

He's shifting from foot to foot now, anxious.

“Are you going to get mad?” he says. “I've been thinking about this a ton, Ashley.”

“For how long?” I say.

“Well, you've been unhappy for a while,” he says. “But I didn't realize it was me until Friday.”

“Thursday,” I correct him.

“No, when you weren't in school on Friday and you didn't text me at all to tell me where you were and I was going to text you and then—it was like an epiphany.”

“Okay,” I say.

He puts his hands on my shoulders and peers into my face. “Don't you think this is a good idea?” he says.

Did I think it was a good idea that he was breaking up with me, instead of me breaking up with him? Because that's how it's supposed to go. He'd laugh like a monkey or say something stupid
or just be
Hector
and not a person in the world would have faulted me for it. Everyone would have understood.

But now everyone will just assume they understand why he broke up with me. They'll look at me and nod and say yes, of course. How could he look at her every day? And I am weak with this idea, the horrific exposed feeling of it, and all the words have blown out of my head.

“I don't know,” I tell him. I can't figure out anything else to say, so I say, “I'm going to go back to work.” I lift the pitcher, dripping with condensation, to show him that I was working. My hand is shaking and the ice is clinking against the sides.

“Okay,” he says. He reaches out, and then pulls his hand back, and then pats me on the shoulder.

He broke up with me,
I think. I turn and hop back through the maze of tables with the pitcher dribbling down into the crook of my arm, and keep going, right into the dark pass-through so I don't have to look at all the tables I'm supposed to be handling, and all those faces. Amy stomps over and says, “Done?” and I say, “Yes,” and surprise myself when I burst into tears.

She sighs disgustedly and grabs one of the rolled-up napkins from the top of the stack. It's still got silverware in it when she hands it to me, and it all clatters to the rubber mat when I unroll it. She leaves me there to sniffle, but it was only a short burst. A summer thunderstorm, rattling the windows and making the house creak.

I don't need him to remind me that I am fine the way I am, just fine. I don't.

I should tell someone,
I think, and pull my phone out of my pocket. But before I unlock it I realize I can't. I can't tell anyone that he broke up with me, left me behind feeling like I was floating in the middle of the ocean on an inner tube, my legs disappearing into the dark water below me.