Mare's War

It’s just a sporty red car parked across our driveway, but when I see it, my stomach plummets. It’s my grandmother.

Already, I hate this summer. Usually, I laze around with my best friends, Eremasi and Rye, for the first few weeks until it’s too late to get a job and then find a babysitting gig or two to keep my parents happy, but this year, my parents jumped in and planned my summer for me. Yesterday was the last day of school. Last night, Mom pulled out the suitcases and made us pack. We’re going to some kind of a reunion—with my grandmother. Today.

My grandmother isn’t at all normal. She doesn’t read mystery novels, or sing in a church choir, or knit, or sew. She doesn’t do the Jumbles in the newspaper, and she hates crosswords. She isn’t at all soft or plump, doesn’t smell like cinnamon, pumpkin bread, or oatmeal cookies. My grandmother, Ms. Marey Lee Boylen, is not the cookie type.

She wears flippy auburn wigs, stiletto shoes, and padded push-up bras. Once, when we were little, my sister, Talitha,
and I found a pair of panties in her bathroom with a fake butt. (We kept snickering, “Fanny pants!” at each other and busting up all afternoon. My mother finally made us go sit in the car.)

My grandmother has long, fake nails and a croaky hoarse drawl, and she’s always holding a long, skinny cigarette—unlit, otherwise my dad will have a fit—between her fingers. She’s loud and bossy and she drinks bourbon with lemon juice at dinner. She has a low-slung red coupe, and Dad says she drives like a bat out of hell. She’s over eighty, and she still lives by herself in a town house stuck on a cliff near the Golden Gate Bridge. She takes the bus so she can avoid parking tickets and walks everywhere else on strappy high-heeled sandals.

Our journalism teacher, Ms. Crase, would say that my grandmother is colorful, like somebody from a book. I say my grandmother is scary, mostly because I never know what she’s going to do next.

She talks to strangers. She asks questions—totally nosy ones—as if just because she’s old, she can afford to be rude. She says what she thinks, she changes her mind every five minutes, and she laughs at me—a lot. She and I are completely different types of people.

I like predictability. I like maps, dictionaries, and directions. I like lists of things to do, knowing the answer, and seeing how everything fits. My grandmother is definitely one of those people who thrive on chaos and instability. She’s what my mother calls a free spirit and what I call completely random.

She can’t even go by a normal name. No one calls my grandmother Grandma or Granny or even Nana. When my parents got married, she said she didn’t want anyone calling her a mother-in-law. When my sister was born, my grandmother told Mom she didn’t want anyone calling her a grandmother, either. They finally decided that the grandchildren were supposed to call her Mare, and that’s what we all call her now, even my dad.

Mare.
Mère
. Like the French word for “mother.” Which is just another example of how Mare is completely bizarre—I mean, we’re not even French. And she’s not our mother.

So going with her to a reunion is bad enough, but to make matters worse, we don’t even really know where we’re going. Mare has some whacked idea that it’s more of an adventure if we just get in the car and drive east. And yeah, I said “car.” See, since 2001, Mare won’t fly—so we have to drive ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE UNITED STATES.

In the middle of the baking-hot summer.

My grandmother, my sister, and me, all trapped in one car.

I’m not the only one who hates this idea. You should have heard my sister.

“What?
Us?
” Tali’s voice had climbed. “Why do we have to go, Mom? They’re Dad’s relatives.”

“They’re your relatives, too,” my mother reminded her. “And, Talitha, it’s a long drive back east. It’s not something your grandmother should attempt alone, and you know your dad can’t take the time off of work until the end of June.”

“Can’t we just fly?” I groaned.

Mom shook her head. “You know Mare doesn’t trust planes. She wants to see her people, so she’s going to get in her car and drive to them.”

“Oh, nice,” Tali sighed. “This is just how I wanted to spend
my
summer break. With the slow and the dead.”

“Talitha Marie,”
my mother had said in that dry-ice voice she uses. “Enough.”

Tali had given my mother one last look and then yelled for Dad. But no matter who she whined to or argued with, the end result is the same: in an hour, my sister and I are starting out on a 2,340-mile drive across the United States to somewhere in Alabama.

So much for summer vacation.

I’m not eager to see Mare, and neither is Tali, judging from the way she’s sitting on the front porch with her backpack.

“Hey, what’s Mare doing here already?” I ask, dropping my bag of library books on the step next to her. “Didn’t she say we weren’t leaving till eleven-thirty?”

Talitha shrugs, busily sending a text to one of her best friends, either Suzanne or Julie. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

“Why are you waiting out here?”

“I’m not waiting. I’m texting, duh.” Tali keeps her eyes on her cell.

I push up my sunglasses. “Well, if Mare wants somebody to wash her car, it’s your turn.”

“Fine. Last time she paid me twenty bucks.”

“What?! She’s
never
paid me anything!”

Tali glances up, her dark eyes barely visible above the edge of her blue-tinted sunglasses. “So? You should’ve asked.”

Before I can answer, the front door swings open. “Girls, why are you outside? Mare’s here.” My mother has a line between her eyebrows and looks a little tired, the way she always does when my grandmother comes over.

“We’re still not leaving for another hour, right?” Tali looks up, brushing a hand through her short, dark hair. Last week she dyed the tips the same fiery auburn as Mare’s.

My mother sighs. “Talitha. You’ll leave when your grandmother’s ready, all right? You’ve seen Suzanne every day for the last six months; the least you could do is spend a little time with your grandmother without complaining. God knows you won’t have her around forever.”

“That sounds bad,” I say nervously. “Is she acting sick or something?”

“Yeah, did she think the UPS guy was a burglar and mace him again?” Tali grins.

My mother ignores both of us. “Look, you’re not going to spend a whole year at this reunion. All you have to do is spend a little quality time with your grandmother on vacation. It won’t kill you. Look at it this way—you’ll finally get a chance to know her.”

“Mare?” I frown. “Mom, we already know her.”

“Hello, she’s been around since we were born,” Tali reminds her, flipping the phone closed. “We’ve had dinner with her the first Sunday of the month since forever. We know her, all right.”

My mother shakes her head. “There are parts of her you won’t know until you take the time to
get
to know them. I wish I’d gotten this kind of opportunity with my grandmother before she passed.”

Tali rolls her eyes and heaves a sigh.

Mom taps Tali on the arm. “Listen. Drooling at the lifeguards at WaveWorld is something you can do every summer for the rest of your life, if you so choose. But this summer, you’ll spend some time with your grandmother, without complaint, thank you. You won’t have her forever, girls. Don’t forget that.”

Tali groans. “Mom, don’t do the guilt thing, okay? Acting like Mare’s going to die any second is so not fair.”

“Yeah, you’re the one who always says she’s ‘a tough old broad,’” I add.

My mother is quiet, looking across the street at the neighbor’s sprinklers. “She is a tough old broad,” she says finally. “You know, girls, the world is different now than it was when Mare was growing up. In the South, women of color worked cleaning houses or tending other people’s children or sharecropping on their farms. If Mare wasn’t such a tough old lady, she wouldn’t have left home; she’d have stayed on your great-grandmother’s farm and probably would never have left the state, never bought herself a nice car or done anything, really. Aunt Josephine always says that running away from home was the best thing Mare ever did. Your grandmother changed the world.”

“Whose world did she change?” Tali asks skeptically. “Not the one I live in.”

My mother shrugs a little, then smiles. “Maybe she’ll tell you sometime.”

“Manipulative, maybe?” Tali scoffs. “Mom, what you’re not getting here is I’m going to be wasting my summer driving around when I could be working, saving up for my car. You could at least make it worth my time. I mean, if I go, couldn’t you buy me a car or something?”

“Buy you a car? When your grandmother is covering all of your expenses and has offered you girls spending money to boot?” My mother’s voice rises. “Don’t start with me about a car, Talitha Marie. You’ll get one when you need one, and I don’t want to hear about it again.”

Mare’s paying us? While Tali does kind of have a point, getting paid for vacation when my other choice is getting a job cleaning up dog doo at a vet’s office like my friend Eremasi? I don’t have to think twice.

“I’m in, especially if she’s paying us,” I say.

My sister glares at me. “Of course you are, Octavia, because in your pitiful little world, anything looks good. I, on the other hand, have a life,” my sister continues, glaring at my mother now, “which you are totally ruining.”

She pushes past my mother and stomps into the house, leaving me to trail behind her, feeling dumb. My mother rolls her eyes and shuts the door.

I used to really like Tali. Since she’s two years older than I am, it’s not like we have all the same friends and interests, but it used to be that she didn’t mind me so much. She’d let Eremasi, Rye, and me read her magazines when she was done with them, and she didn’t get mad if we borrowed her CDs,
as long as we put them back in order. She let me tag along with whatever she was doing, sometimes even with her friends, and I took it for granted that nothing would ever change.

And then it did. Suddenly it’s like she objects to me existing. I can’t even look in her direction without her throwing a fit.
Octavia, buy another color. Octavia, go to another movie. Octavia, get your own friends
. Now that she’s going to be a senior, it’s even worse. Tali walks to a friend’s house and catches a ride so people don’t even know she’s my sister. Tali and I might live in the same house, but it’s like we’re from different planets.

It would have been great to go on a vacation on the other side of the country this summer—by myself. Now not only am I stuck with Mare, my parents are making Tali go, too.

Like I told Eremasi and Rye, I already completely hate this summer.

Eleven-fifteen. My grandmother closes the trunk with a solid thump and minces on her high-heeled sandals back toward the driver’s seat, the last of a cigarette between her fingers. Dad is standing in the living room with his arms crossed, the screen door a flimsy barrier between us. Mom has already kissed us twice and gone back inside to pack up a few things for a snack, but Dad’s fidgeting. Even through the screen, the tension rolls off him in waves. He’s told us to be good now about six times, to watch the speed limit, and to make sure
the car doesn’t overheat. He’s finally finished telling Mare the best route to get to I-5.