Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (2 page)

One winter morning maybe a year later, I woke to their shouting. I raced into the kitchen. My father’s colorless hands were clenched as he slammed them on the countertop. He hit a green cough drop and it skidded and crashed into a million pieces on the floor.

“Enough,” he said. “Enough, goddamn it.”

My mother said my father walked out that time, the final time, because she had spent eight hundred dollars at the French Hen in Manchester—she’d special-ordered lox and toro and paddlefish caviar—and he wanted her to be miserable. And because she wasn’t about to let him have the last word—“No way in hell,” she’d said—
she
started packing.

I went deep into the woods behind our house and screamed until I was panting and lightheaded and falling on my knees. The trees were bare above me, reaching like roads on a map. My mother pointed out the redness in my eyes when I came home and I told her I’d been practicing headstands on the moss; the little vessels must have burst.

She was stuffing our clothing into garbage bags, telling me how she’d been wanting to dye her hair darker but my father had been against it. She pinched her cheeks in the mirror.

“Definitely,” she said. “I’m definitely going to go dark.”

I kept thinking that I wished I had a warm cat so it could sit on my lap. My mother was allergic to cats and she hated them. “You can’t even fry them into an appetizer,” she said. “So what’s the use?”

She called her parents just before we left the house.

“Daddy,” she said. I’d never heard her use that word before. “I am going to need some money. Lorca and I are making changes. We’ve had enough.”

We drove to New York City from New Hampshire that day with my mother’s pots and knives and induction pans seat-belted to the back seat, and the garbage bags piled so high in the rear of the car that they blocked the sun.

I told her, “I have a book report due on Monday.”

She said, “This isn’t an issue of life and death.”

I told her she was right, remembering how she’d said “we” to her father. How that had flattered me. How I didn’t want to let her down.

Outside it was March gray, and the windows were fogging up. As soon as I started writing something in the frost, she switched the defroster on and off a million times. It made a whirring sound as if it were speaking French. She said there was no reason for us to stay in Cow Hampshire. She called it that, Cow Hampshire. It drove my father nuts. He grew up in Cow Hampshire. My mother said she wanted to be in the food world again, where Pizza Hut wasn’t considered gourmet. Find a life again. Put me in a school where all the kids weren’t related and where the parents had teeth. She kept giving me this look with her eyes like we needed to be hopeful but the sides of her mouth were quivering. I could see them.

“Do you love me?” she asked. “You know, everything’s going to be okay.”

If I said it wouldn’t, she would turn on me too.

“Everything’s okay already,” I said, holding my breath so my voice would stop shaking.

“Everything except your father,” she said. “He’s a wimp. Never fall for a wimp. Love someone stronger, or love no one at all.”

I nodded.

I kept the lox and caviar and toro in freezer bags on my lap; they looked like my stomach turned inside out. I pinched the back of my thigh until my face turned hot pink. I could see it in the side mirror. My mother looked straight ahead, her knuckles white, like tapioca pearls, over the wheel.

“Wimp,” she kept saying. “Goddamn wimp.”

I missed the rest of third grade.

We moved in with Aunt Lou, who wasn’t my mother’s real sister, because my mother was adopted and Aunt Lou wasn’t. My mother liked to say that explained everything—even though they grew up in the same house on Long Island with the same mother and father who loaned them money, going to the same schools, eating the same gloppy dinners and Chinese on Sundays.

Aunt Lou lived on the Upper West Side in a two-bedroom that smelled of supermarket candles and dust. She’d been renting a room to a foreign student, and as it happened, he’d just moved out. I slept where he had, in a small dark room whose rattling window stared into the fluorescent-lit staircase of a building across the way. I found matchbooks and ginger-candy wrappers he’d left behind. Aunt Lou never cleaned. My mother slept in the living room, which was the kitchen, den, foyer, and dining room too.

Our first night there, I got up at three and went into the living room, where they were still talking, and asked if they were tired. They made a scene of hugging each other.

“Are you going to mother us already?” Aunt Lou said. “You just got here, for chrissake.”

They laughed, the two of them. My mother could have said something in my defense. She didn’t. I’d been about to offer to make her an
omelette au fromage
just the way she liked. I didn’t. I told myself that living there was only temporary.

In bed, I chewed the sides of my fingernails until I tasted blood. I recited my book report to myself over and over until I fell asleep.
Bridge to Terabithia.
Leslie was the new kid too. When she drowned, it broke Jesse’s heart.

That night, they stayed up till dawn, drinking glass after glass of red wine. My mother tried out the same recipe seven different ways, jotting things down and getting pastry flour on her elbows. Aunt Lou gossiped about the wife of her boss and tapped her ashes into the pages of the
TV Guide.

I woke up to the beeping sound of a truck backing up.

I said “Dad?” before I remembered where I was. My father had an old pickup so covered in rust that the rear bumper hung off like a broken jaw. When we left, the right headlight was smashed too. Everything he had was broken.

In the living room, there was a spatula wedged into the couch, the smell of butter and onion in the air, potato skins tracked onto the carpet, pans stacked above the lip of the sink. My mother shoved a steaming wooden spoon at me before I could say a word.

I tasted it. “More chives,” I said, hoping.

She nodded gravely.

For a moment, we were in cahoots.

My mother had gone to the best culinary school, won a James Beard, and had “quite a reputation” before she married my father and moved to Cow Hampshire. So when we moved to New York, she got a job faster than you could say
vichyssoise.
Head chef and creative director of Le Canard Capricieux.
Zagat
had given it a 27. That year, Gael Greene wrote that my mother had “restored the Croque Monsieur to its long-lost position of dignity.”

She found me a home tutor for the summer, a girl who insisted I call her by her first name, Neon. She smelled like skunk and she never stayed for as long as my mother paid her to. She’d say, “You know all this,” as she whizzed through the textbook pages.

I kept asking where I’d go to school in the fall.

“Sprout,” my mother said, “this is something I need to do.”

I hadn’t asked.

“Every woman should have a career. A life.”

I hadn’t asked.

“Your father made it so impossible.”

I didn’t want her to talk about him again.

“He demeaned my career. You can’t be a chef in New Hampshire. Everybody knows that. He knew that. But he liked New Hampshire. His roots. His roots. Blah-blah-blah. His stupid, trashy roots. It was New Hampshire or nothing. He kept saying I wasn’t trying hard enough.”

She would be just about yelling then. His roots were my grandpa, who lived in a home for the elderly, called everyone Linda, and smelled like scented toilet paper. I’d met him twice and both times my mother’s arms were wound so tightly around me that when I leaned forward to hug him, she came with me. She said he was uneducated, but I didn’t know what that meant.

“Do you think I didn’t try?” she asked but wasn’t really asking. “I tried harder than anyone.”

I nodded like crazy until it felt something like whiplash.

“It’s what I have to do for myself,” she said. “For women everywhere.”

She talked a lot about women.

“Here’s my credit card. I want you to sign yourself up for some ballet classes.”

“I just wanted to know where I’ll be going to school,” I said.

She threw her hands up. I tried to barricade the crying in my chest before it could get to my face.

The September after we moved to New York I started fourth grade at PS 84, where there were bars or chains on everything, a metal detector, and not a tree in sight. The security guard told me I better wear my red raincoat inside out if I didn’t want to be a target for the Crips, who were still active in the neighborhood, for my information. “Crisps?” I asked.

“Oh Jesus,” the guard said, shaking her head, putting her palms together in prayer.

Because I was white and Jewish and the only white and Jewish girl going to public school in our neighborhood, they called me Latke, but not in a nice way. Everyone thought I was a suck-up because I started talking about Federico García Lorca when the teacher asked me to introduce myself. A boy named Jesús yelled from the back, “Does poetry make you horny?” Everyone was in hysterics. It didn’t help that I brought an artisanal-cheese plate for lunch and the
époisses
stunk up the entire cafeteria.

On the way home from my first day of school, I wore no raincoat even though it was pouring. I treated myself to a ceramic knife at Williams-Sonoma. You could buy two for twenty dollars. They were delicate but they had the sharpest little tips. I’d use them whenever my mother was out too late, didn’t ask about my homework, didn’t kiss me goodbye when I kissed her, didn’t notice when I made her four flavors of ice cream from scratch on her birthday, with everything organic.

Eventually my teacher, Mrs. Weiss, called, concerned, just making sure everything was all right at home. I should have known she would. Twice she’d asked me why there was blood on my spelling tests. It was from my wrists. “Change in altitude,” I’d lied, touching my nose. She was no dummy. She’d looked around for used tissues and asked if we’d lived on a mountain in New Hampshire. “Mmm-hmm,” I lied. “Absolutely.”

Aunt Lou grounded me, sent me to my room. “Why are teachers calling us?” she said, as if I’d revealed some big secret: we were breeding endangered species of birds or keeping hu-man body parts in the freezer. It was her house and she had a point, my mother said, shrugging as she fingered the newest Mario Batali book. “Listen to your aunt. She’s doing us an enormous favor, letting us stay here. The least we can do is not be a bother.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Lou said, but I knew the pleasure was only with regard to my mother.

We never moved out of Aunt Lou’s. Not after my mother got a raise. Not even after she got two. It didn’t take me long to figure out it had nothing to do with money. I wasn’t stupid. My mother loved that Lou waited up for her at night, a couple of glasses and a bottle of red wine resting next to her. It didn’t matter what time my mother got home. Or what time Lou had to be all business in a skirt suit at the legal-secretary job she’d never leave. Lou would drink an entire pot of coffee just to keep herself awake and prepared for anything my mother might want to talk about. The thing was (the thing that nobody cared about so much) was that I was waiting up too. I wasn’t tired. I didn’t need coffee. And I would have made her
chocolat chaud
just the way she liked, with a hefty pinch of salt.

Things pretty much stayed the same from then on. There were good years and bad years. My mother was warm in flickers and then very cold. All the while, I waited. Hope was lit and hope was extinguished incessantly. On and off. On and off. But my urge was constant. Like a band of moths stuck between the screen and the window but in my chest instead. I wanted the pain. Wanted it. Wanted it. It was the only consistent thing. It helped me breathe and sometimes more than that. Sometimes it gave me breath. And peace and comfort and something to look forward to.
Come,
it said to me. And I did. I raced.
Come here and rest your head.

If someone had cared to search my room, this is what she would have found: painter’s razors in the cuffs of my old jeans, surgical tweezers—two pairs—tucked below the insoles of my old sneakers, lighters under my bed, and matches pretending to be bookmarks in a book that I hadn’t touched in forever. With a flame, I could make leisurely circles around my bellybutton until I just about died.

Now, home from school because of Kanetha Jackson, I heard my mother on the bedroom phone with Aunt Lou.

“You’re so right. I have tried my best. I’ve tried everything. I have to give up and let someone else step in.”

I felt more exhausted than I’d ever felt. I lay down. I thought of myself at boarding school and of all the stalls that wouldn’t lock. I thought of running three miles down a dark, windy road littered with wet leaves, just to get some quiet. Just to rip off my glove and make little cuts with a pocketknife on the tips of my fingers, like scoring dough. Then I thought of my mother, alone with Aunt Lou, who had no idea how to take care of her. I was the one who replaced her spices when they ran low. I took her hair out of the shower drain. I prepared a glass of cucumber water for her at night. It was always empty by morning.

I went into Lou’s room with two cups of steaming tea. My mother was sprawled on Lou’s dramatic bed amid one hundred rows of shiny, overstuffed pillows. Her feet were flexed and her hand was over her eyes as if she were blocking a glare. A sleeping mask was in the crook of her arm, defrosting onto the gold sheet. Wolfgang Puck was on TV, selling pans, aprons, and steak knives. I needed to convince her it was the last time she would have to deal with this. I wouldn’t embarrass her again. But also, I needed to convince her that she couldn’t live without me.

“Please don’t start,” she said before I’d opened my mouth.

“I brought tea,” I said.

She sat up. I gave her the one with the nicer shade of brown. She took it delicately into her hands, as if she were very sick and frail, and sipped. Only I got to see this side of her, undone and vulnerable, slow-moving and weepy, a French lace cookie. In the world, she was something else entirely. She shouted orders at the restaurant. And as she walked outside she took long steps, so deliberate that each time her foot came to the ground, people looked to see if she was signaling something important in the concrete.