The Princesses of Iowa (2 page)

When I finally limped past security, looking less like Sabrina and more like an escapee from the asylum, I was almost happy to see my mother. At least she couldn’t dump me on the spot, as I was sure Jake would do if he saw me in this state. My mother stood at a slight angle, the Leaning Tower of Jacque, with one tanned arm perched on her hip and one hanging down casually at her side, holding a trendy bag. She wore Jackie O sunglasses (“My namesake!” she always said), and her hair was swept up in a neat summer do. She looked less like a mom and more like a cool older sister.

“Hey,” I said, reaching her. “Where’s Lacey and Nikki? Where’s Jake?”

“What happened to you?” She held me at an arm’s length. “Did you have to ride in the baggage hold?”

I sighed. “There were fat people and screaming babies and running . . . I’m just tired.”

“Oh, honey,” my mother said. “It’s always a good idea to stop in the restroom to freshen up before you leave the terminal.”

“I know.” I did know. I’d been flying with my mother for seventeen years, and each flight required a stop to freshen up. I should have gone directly from my flight to a sink and mirror, but after traveling for eighteen-plus hours, I was so tired that my fatigue seemed to take on physical properties of its own, like it could stand beside me and pull at my hair and clothes.

She glanced around. “This airport is so small, you never know who might see you. You can’t take any chances right now. Not after —”

“Mom,” I said. “I know.”

My mother wrapped her arms around me loosely, raising her voice almost imperceptibly. “I’m so happy you’re home! I missed you! My little girl is all grown up!”

“Okay,” I said. “Seriously, though, where is everybody?”

“I thought we could spend some time together, just the two of us,” she said. “Plus, the Austins’ barbeque is tonight. I’m sure they’re helping with it.”

Helping? My friends? I loved them, but I wouldn’t exactly call them helpful. Well, Nikki maybe, even Jake, but if Lacey was doing anything but lying out I would eat my boarding pass.

My mother pulled away and started walking toward the baggage claim. “Let’s get your luggage and then go get some lunch. I’m just dying to hear all about Paris.”

I stopped. “What?” She didn’t notice, and I had to kind of shuffle-jog to catch up with her. “You’re dying to hear about Paris?”

The people from my flight had positioned themselves around the baggage carousel. Baby McScreamy was peacefully snoozing in a hippie sling across its mother’s chest. The old man who’d crushed my toes was sitting in a wheelchair at the U-turn. Probably looking for someone else to maim.

“Of course, honey!” My mother planted herself strategically behind a giant linebacker-type guy. “The lights, the museums, the food! The men!” She winked at me, then checked her skinny gold watch. “I hope this doesn’t take too long.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Lights? Food? I spent the whole time babysitting.”

“Paris is so romantic,” my mother said, and the linebacker turned to give her a smile.

“Romantic?” My mind played a slide show of my summer in Paris: Nights lying as still as possible on a tiny twin bed, waiting for the ancient fan’s breeze to sweep across my face. Borrowing the baby’s diaper cream to treat my own heat rash. The time the Eastons left for the opera together and came home separately, an hour apart, both so drunk they were practically crawling, and so hungover the next morning that I had to take the baby on my day off. The man in Aix-en-Provence who had lifted his little daughter over a street planter so she could pee, and how she smiled hazily at passersby as it trickled down between her legs. The time Mrs. Easton threw a piece of expensive china at her husband’s head and it flew straight out the window, only to hit a pigeon on the next rooftop and knock it flat dead. “Are you joking?”

“What girl wouldn’t kill to be an au pair for the summer?” The linebacker turned around again, and my mother asked him, “Am I right?”

“Sure.” He looked her up and down and turned to me. “Listen to your sister.”

My mother giggled. “Sister! This is my daughter.”

“No way,” he said. “You can’t be a day over twenty-five.”

“Oh, you!” my mother said, and turned to me. “Every girl dreams of spending the summer in Paris. Being an au pair will look so great on your college applications, all that responsibility and international experience!”

“Mother. I was not an au pair! For one thing, au pairs get paid. I was not paid.” The baggage carousel grumbled to life, and the first bag tumbled down the ramp.

“They fed you. And housed you! In Paris!”

“What’s your bag look like?” the linebacker asked.

“In exchange for slave labor,” I said. “It was in their best interest to keep me alive so I could continue to do everything for them.”

The linebacker said, “This one’s mine,” and scooped up one of those gigantic hockey bags, slinging it across his shoulders.

My mother rolled her eyes at me, and winked at the linebacker. “Teenagers.”

“For another thing,” I said, “au pairs are supposed to have days off. Like, regularly! Every time I tried to take a day off, Mrs. Easton would cry and beg me to take the baby ‘just this one time.’”

“Oh, there’s your bag!” My mother pointed, and the linebacker grabbed it and swung it off the carousel in one clean motion.

“Where are you parked?” he asked my mother. “I could carry this out for you.”

She put up a token fight but quickly demurred when he insisted. “And they say chivalry is dead!”

He followed her out of the terminal, trotting like a puppy. I thought about calling Lacey or Nikki to pick me up and hiding in a bathroom until they came and rescued me. But my cell phone was still at home in Willow Grove, probably still resting in the top drawer of my mother’s dresser, where she put everything she took away from us, and I was so tired I just wanted to go home, crawl into my bed, and sleep until everything melted away and I could wake up brand-new at the beginning of my senior year and shake the whole summer off like a long bad dream.

So I followed her, as I’d done my entire life. Nothing, really, had changed.

My mother talked the whole way home. I tuned in and out, hearing snippets of gossip and updates about her job and something about someone’s cat, but mostly I was looking out the window, trying to see every single leaf on every single tree before we passed it. Paris had been beautiful at times, like one night when I’d managed to slip away from the stuffy apartment and walk through the streets alone and ended up on this stone bridge and everything was quiet and I could see the Eiffel Tower lit up in the distance. But I’d missed Iowa, more than I’d even realized: green as far as you can see, the horizon stretching all the way to the sky without a single building interrupting it.

“And I thought we could do our annual shopping trip to Chicago this weekend, even though I’m sure you picked up tons of great clothes in Paris, because I want to take you over to campus and show you the sorority house and maybe see if we can introduce you to some nice girls who might have some insights about the application process. . . .”

We drove across the bridge just outside of town, broad concrete rather than narrow stone, but the river beneath us was wide and clean and sparkling in the August sun. After the bridge it was just another two miles into Willow Grove, first the chain stores on the outskirts and then the cute little shops around the central park downtown.

“. . . started thinking about what you’re going to wear on the first day of school? Because you really need to make a strong impression after what happened last spring. But, of course, if you remind everyone you spent the summer in Paris, that should help people forget —”

“We have a stoplight now?” I asked.

My mother glanced up at the red light over the intersection, seeming surprised. “Yes, I suppose they did just install that in June. I’m so used to it already!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She laughed. “It’s just a stoplight, sweetheart.”

I slouched in my seat. “It would have been nice to know, that’s all.”

The light turned green and we rolled forward, heading down Main Street. The houses were a familiar assortment of one-story ranches, small square boxes, cute bungalows, and nice big Victorians, but my eyes were peeled for any other changes my mother had failed to mention: new siding on this house, a stump on that corner where there used to be a tall oak tree. When we finally pulled into our own driveway, I stiffened. “You painted the front door.”

“Don’t you love it? I know red is such a bold choice, but Stella said it would improve our curb appeal, and as usual she was right!”

“I think it sucks.” I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me, leaving my bags in the trunk for my mother to deal with.

I felt more human after a much-needed nap, shower, and luxuriously long primping session in preparation for the Austins’ barbeque. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice in one day: the first time Jake saw me would be perfect. The sounds of my mother and sister yelling at each other floated upstairs, and I listened idly as I pumiced my feet. While I was gone, Miranda had gotten her driver’s license, cashed in four years of babysitting money for a beater Honda, dyed her hair burgundy, and changed her name to “Mirror.” I’d left behind a gangly, geeky freshman and came back to find an angry alternateen.

The yelling seemed to wear itself out with a few last slammed doors, and I gave myself a final appraisal in the mirror. My hair was darker than it had been in years, thanks to a summer away from my colorist, but it was kind of working. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. I might pull off the Audrey transformation thing yet.

My mother seemed relieved to see me looking more like myself. “Isn’t that so much better, honey?”

“I love my shower,” I said. “I love my bed and my closet and my window, but mostly I love my shower.”

My sister stood in the corner, scowling. “What’s so great about it?”

“Water pressure is a beautiful thing, Miranda, my dear. In Paris —”

“My name is Mirror.” Her voice was a shard of glass. “Can I go now? I’m picking up Jeremy, and the movie starts at six.”

“You know, honey,” my mother said, ignoring her, “if you’d just take a little rejuvenating spritzer on the plane with you, like I suggested, your skin wouldn’t look so sallow after traveling.”

I felt my shoulders sag. “I know that, Mother. But I didn’t have —”

“Can I go?” my sister asked, interrupting me again. We had been on the same team as kids, us against Mom, until about middle school, when all the things our mother had nagged us about over the years —
stand up straight, you don’t want to look cheap; don’t frown, you’ll get wrinkles; brush your hair, it looks like a rat’s nest; no more cookies, you don’t want to get fat; smile, you never know who might be falling in love with you!
— suddenly made sense to me. Seemed important. I wanted in on my mother’s secrets. The triangle shifted its balance and I allied myself with our mother, leaving Miranda out in the distance, the lonely isosceles angle.

My mother sighed. “Fine. But I want you home by ten. And please say goodbye to Daddy before you go.”

Miranda gave me a superior look. “Have fun at the Austin Freakshow.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I hadn’t seen Jake since June. It was stupid, but I was nervous to see him again. What if things were weird? What if I didn’t live up to his memory of me? Had I embarrassed myself in the letters I’d sent him? I’d filled up an entire notebook with letters to him and to Lacey, but I’d gotten only postcards and short notes in reply. But that was because they were busy — normal people didn’t have time to write long letters anymore, not unless you were stuck all by yourself without a cell phone or email in a country where you didn’t even speak the language.

“Like you don’t know,” my sister said. “Stella can’t even move her face from all the botulism she gets injected in it —”

“It’s called Botox,” my mother interrupted. “And it’s not cheap.”

I had a brief pang of jealousy that Miranda had seen Jake all summer. Of course my mother would have dragged her over to the Austins’ when Stella needed help with the latest wedding. Not that I imagined they were suddenly best friends — I doubted they’d even talked — but she got to be in the same room with him while I would have killed just to be in the same country.

“— and Jake’s dad is always pulling weird macho head trips on Jake, challenging him to play H-O-R-S-E or whatever, putting him in headlocks, calling him a pussy if he doesn’t want to go hunting with him,” Miranda continued. “Major creepers.”

“Whatever, Miranda. He’s just messing around.”

She shrugged. “Okay. And I’m sure he’ll be just messing around when he ties some gay kid to the back of a truck and drags him down the highway.”

“God! Exaggerate much?”

“Miranda!” my mother snapped. “The Austins are good people. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

My sister rolled her eyes. “Sorry, Mommie Dearest.” She spun lazily and headed up to her room, stomping each foot as she went.

“Well!” My mother flashed me a brilliant smile. “Don’t mind her; she’s going through a difficult phase!” She reached up to untuck a strand of hair from behind my ear and style it casually around my face. “Anyway, it’s been hard for her, trying to follow in your footsteps. She looks up to you, Paige.”