Infandous (11 page)

Is that so different, though, from what we do now? We tell stories to make ourselves feel better, to make sense of things we don’t understand. And real life is scary, and it is magical, at least life in Venice Beach. Not always the nice kind of magic, though.

Anyway, Mrs. Austin felt squidgy about the sexy times. Ms. Kramer, the English teacher, seemed to get off on the whole thing. She went into exquisite detail about all the different ways Zeus got with humans, tricking them, seducing them, and then getting them out of the way by turning them into animals, heavenly bodies, whatever worked.

She was kind of a man-hater, Ms. Kramer. She always made a point of calling on the girls first when she asked for volunteers, and more often than not, she’d shoot down a guy’s answer even though she would have nodded encouragingly if a girl had said the same thing.

She had been a women’s studies major at some liberal college back East, and her agenda seemed to be to empower girls at all costs. Of course, since we all knew that was her agenda, none of us felt all that empowered by her praise. I can’t speak for the others, but I always felt belittled by it. So I’d skip the reading and say the dumbest things I could think of to elicit one of those nodding smiles, seeing how far I could push it.

I wasn’t the only one half-assing the class. It seemed like most of us knew just enough about Greek myths to feel like learning more wasn’t worth our time. There was this one guy, Gil, a complete Venice Beach stock character, a stoner with a collection of Jim Morrison T-shirts and parents who owned a pot pharmacy. He was flagrantly asleep in the middle of class on one of the last days of our Sophocles discussion. Kramer decided she was going to make an example of Gil, and she did the whole book drop on the desk like it was a teen sitcom.

“Now that we have your attention, care to tell us about Oedipus?”

“Killed his dad, fucked his mom, ripped out his eyeballs, the end,” Gil said and went back to sleep.

Kramer should have known better. The Jim Morrison shirt was a dead giveaway. Everybody knows the unspeakable shit.

***

That was last fall. Then it seemed funny to me to make irreverent jokes about how Zeus screwing humans wasn’t really all that different from the Virgin Mary getting knocked up by God, just to see how Ms. Kramer would spin it. Now things aren’t so funny. Maybe that’s why Naomi, with her too-long-for-her-age hair and shiny, Botoxed forehead, irritates me more than in years past when she offers to take me shopping right after picking me up from the airport, eyeing my Dickies and Vans and white V-neck tee with an expression that might be disdain. It’s hard to tell with the Botox. Maybe she is going for pleasant concern. It all pretty much looks the same.

Naomi’s two daughters, Evelyn and Sarah, seem to agree with their mother that a shopping trip is in order. I think they see me as a fun summer project.

They are growing up—Evie will be an official teenager in the fall when she turns thirteen, though she looks closer to fifteen or sixteen. Those Georgia peaches ripen fast. Sarah is eleven. Both of the girls have their mother’s blonde hair, with waves like my mom’s but without a hint of her copper.

They have only met my mom, like, half a dozen times, and they haven’t seen her in four years. That was the last time she visited Atlanta with me. I’m not sure what went down on that trip, but maybe my mom got tired of being a morality lesson that Naomi seemed to never tire of sharing with her girls.

“When you choose to be a young mother,” Naomi told Evelyn and Sarah, with my mom sitting
right there
as if she were a wax statue that passersby should feel totally comfortable talking about, “other choices become much more difficult. Like college—that wasn’t an option for Rebecca after she got pregnant at seventeen.” My mom just took it, spinning her wineglass by its long, thin stem, and didn’t say a word. Tongueless.

Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that my mom enrolled at the local junior college the fall after her final trip to Atlanta.

Naomi spoke in the soft lilting tones of the South, even though she was no more southern than my mom. Junior year at Emory University, she met a pro golfer at a sorority mixer. So she stayed, affecting an accent along with a massive hat collection.

Naomi is five years older than my mom, so by the time my mom got knocked up, Naomi, almost finished with her senior year at Emory, was engaged to Bobby LeBlanc.

Okay. Stop right there. Robert is a perfectly fine name, and there is nothing wrong with being called Bobby if you are under eight years old. But any adult man who goes by Bobby instead of Robert, Rob, or even Bert clearly has some Peter Pan issues to work out.

Whatever. Bobby LeBlanc is actually a pretty cool guy. He never complains about me moving into the spare bedroom for a week or two every summer, and he knows more about music and art than I would expect him to. He’s sweet with his girls in a way that used to make my stomach hurt when I was younger and still wished my own dad would show up one day—just slide into the empty chair at our table with a cup of coffee, ruffle my hair like that’s the way it had always been.

It’s Naomi who gets under my skin. More for what she
didn’t
do than anything she ever has done. She
didn’t
come back to California when my mom was pregnant with me. She
didn’t
offer her knocked-up, underage sister a place to stay when their parents told her that the pregnancy conflicted with their family values and that she’d have to find a new place to live. She
didn’t
show up for my birth or help Mom with the medical bills that she had no way of paying on her own. She
didn’t
tell my rotten, holier-than-thou grandparents that they were assholes. And when she married Bobby LeBlanc a year later, when I was ten months old, she
didn’t
invite my mom and me to the wedding. Because, you know, my asshole grandparents would be there to “give her away” to Bobby, and harlot Rebecca and bastard Sephora would make everyone uncomfortable.

So before I’ll let them take me to the mall, I insist on restaurant food. That is one of the perks of visiting Naomi; they eat out
a lot.
At home, a meal out is a rarity, and other than the freebies my working friends slip me, I pretty much live on snacks from home that I stuff into my backpack each morning.

I order a sweet tea—large—from the hostess, even though she gives me a look to let me know that taking drink orders is not in her job description. Evie and Sarah wait for the real waitress to show up a few minutes later to order their Diet Coke and lemonade. It’s halfway between lunchtime and dinnertime, so the restaurant is quiet and no one but me is hungry. I order some fries and, on second thought, ask for some biscuits with honey too.

Evie stares at my plate with horror, wrinkling her nose as I split the first biscuit, steam wafting out of it, and smear it with butter before drowning it in honey. “You’re not going to be thin for long if you keep eating like that,” she says, but she says it genuinely like she’s trying to help me, not like she’s trying to be bitchy.

“I’m not all that thin to start with,” I say in between bites, and it’s true. I have hips and tits and thighs.

Sarah is eyeing my fries, so I push the basket over toward her. Her eyes flit to her mother’s face, and I see Naomi’s almost imperceptible shake of the head before Sarah says, “No, thanks.”

There’s not much to say while I chow down. Naomi asks about my summer plans at home, and I tell her about my brand-new job sweeping up at the surf shop. She is not impressed. So I ask the girls about their summers to take some attention off of me.

“Mama has me taking extra dance classes over the summer,” says Sarah. She sounds ambivalent.

“Oh, yeah? Do you like dancing?”

She shrugs. “Mama says it’ll make me more graceful.”

I ask, “Do you
want
to be more graceful?”

Sarah looks thoughtful, like she’s never considered before whether grace is something she actually desires for herself, and Naomi screws up her face in a way that will keep her dermatologist in BMWs for the foreseeable future.

Evie, who appears to be in charge of managing her mother’s emotions, something I remember from summers past, changes the topic by saying, “Daddy had a pool installed last May. It’s been great with all the heat.”

A pool. That doesn’t sound completely terrible. I polish off the biscuits and wonder if I can finagle a new swimsuit out of Naomi.

***

Shopping isn’t a complete fiasco. It turns out that Evie has developed pretty good taste, though both the girls are a little obsessed with my boobs—they want me to buy the skimpiest bikini in the brightest color, which turns out to be an extra-small hot pink.

I try it on to humor them, remembering how fun it had been for me to dress my mom when I was little. Sometimes she’d let me pick out her whole outfit and even do her makeup and her hair. Then we’d go out like that, to the beach or the thrift store, and even like that, fashioned by an eight-year-old, my mother was still beautiful.

I yank off my pants and my underwear, too, before stepping into the tiny bikini. The whole thing is a series of triangular scraps of fabric held together with four ties—two on top, two on the bottom. There I am in the mirror, and I know Naomi is going to have a conniption when she sees this, all the
skin
, so for a joke I open the door.

But when I step out of the dressing room, I realize I’ve made a tactical error. It’s not Naomi’s expression so much as the look in her eyes that clues me in. Evie and Sarah are all, like, “Ooh, you look so beautiful! That color is amazing with your skin!” which is preteen code for “The fleshy swell of your breasts is hypnotic, and we like the way the ties look untie-able on your hips!”

For a moment I feel what it must be like to be my mother—the power of it and the intensity too.

“It’s a little much, don’t you think?” says Naomi, at last, and I don’t want to but I feel embarrassed by my body, by how lush it is in this suit, how positioned and displayed. As her eyes roam my body, I see her expression freeze on my crotch, where she seems to realize that there’s
no way
I’ve got panties on underneath.

I end up with a suit Naomi picks out, a slightly more demure halter style in cobalt blue. Actually, it’s the suit I’d have chosen for myself. Then the girls manage to help me pick out a pretty cute summer dress. Not too short. Turquoise.

And just like every year, I have to begrudgingly admit that Naomi is not entirely the devil, though it’s tempting to paint her that way. She clearly loves her girls, doting on them, and she doesn’t
have
to be nice to me, to invite me and pay for my plane ticket and take care of me every summer. And though we haven’t spoken of it, I know the offer is still on the table, though
why
she’s offered it, I’m less sure—accumulated guilt, maybe, over her abandonment of my mother? A desire to cosmically set things right, to be there in a way that she wasn’t there for her sister?

There would be more of this—the shopping, the restaurants, and the smooth, quiet rides in new cars.

She’s a better aunt than she ever was a sister. I think she
does
feel guilty, and I feel guilty too, like I’m cheating on my mother. There’s this story I read, a Greek poem about two sisters, one of whom is raped and mutilated by the other one’s husband. The married sister’s retribution is immediate and terrible, and her first alliance to her sister is all that ultimately matters.

That is not the story of Naomi and Rebecca.

I think it’s interesting how the same person can be so different in any number of relationships, as if our skin is way more elastic than it looks, stretching and shrinking around all the different people someone can become—a sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, a daughter, a friend. An enemy.

Naomi has to do some serious skin shifting each summer to welcome me to her house, even though my grandparents still won’t say my name. In her own way, Naomi loves me. She has to, right? Otherwise, why go to all this trouble? And why offer to complicate things further, more permanently?

If I were to take her up on her offer—to do my senior year in Georgia, to establish residency, and to apply to Emory the following fall—how would Naomi reconcile the roles of aunt and daughter?

When I leave on Sunday, Naomi’s skin will snap into a different shape. I know she ignores the calls from her parents when I’m in town. Once I was old enough to understand what was going on, I started noticing as she checked the number and chose not to answer when her phone rang. They call often, at least two or three times a day. Probably for little things that don’t really matter, like to ask how Sarah is doing in her dance classes or if the girls got the little presents they sent or to pass along a piece of news about a common friend.

Two phone calls a day, seven days a week … that makes 730 calls a year. And I’ve been alive for seventeen years. All told, that’s 12,410 potential telephone conversations.

And they have never heard my voice.

If someone hurt my mother the way they have, there is no way I would answer 12,410 of their phone calls. There is no way I would answer any of them.

***

The guest bedroom is nearly as big as our entire apartment back in Venice, but I guess that’s not really saying too much considering what a shithole we live in.

You know, every year I visit this place, and every year it doesn’t really change that much—maybe a fresh coat of paint in one of the bathrooms or a new couch in the media room. This year it’s the pool. It’s not the
house
that’s so different from one year to the next. It’s me. Because every year I see a little more clearly that this is what wealth looks like. This is what we have none of. And hey, that’s okay, because I have always been able to tell myself that my mom and I have something that these people don’t have. We are best friends, she and I. We would never do anything to hurt each other. We will always be there for each other; we are a team.