The Beautiful Between (3 page)

4

I have trouble calming down after Jeremy leaves, and not just because I’m sure I’m still totally unprepared for the physics quiz. My skin feels itchy, but not like I have to scratch it; it itches every time I’m still—when I get into bed and try to read, when I turn out the light and try to sleep. I’m thinking about my father, someone I never knew. Or anyway, I have no memory of knowing him, so that’s the same thing.

This is what I do know, and it’s strange to think this, because I’ve never felt the need to lay it out before. He died just after I turned two, and that’s young enough that you can’t really speak yet, and I read somewhere that you can’t build memories before you have the language to express them. I don’t remember living with him, but I know that before my dad died, we lived in a townhouse a few blocks east and south of here. But I can’t remember the house, or the way the furniture was laid out, or the smell of the carpet on which I took my very first steps. And I don’t know how my father died. It’s always been kind of hazy to me. When I was very young, I had this notion of a man falling off a ladder, but I know that’s something I made up, a child’s idea of how a person dies, maybe something out of a movie I’d seen.

After my father died, we moved in with my grandmother—my mother’s mother, who lives across town, on the Upper West Side. Her apartment was definitely not decorated with kids in mind. Everything is white and spotlessly clean. The apartment would be pristine but for my grandmother’s complete inability to throw things away. I think I get that from her—the need to keep things, paired with a compulsion to make things neat no matter how cluttered. I like knowing that—being sure that I got something from her. There must be things I got from my father, things I will never be able to pinpoint.

We moved to this apartment the summer I turned eight, and I started a new school. My school, Jeremy’s school, the one I still go to. It has kids from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and if you stay there all thirteen years, you get a special picture in the yearbook marked with the word “survivor.” I still remember the first day of third grade: I saw Emily Winters with her mother and father; Alexis Bryant’s mother and father, and her big sister leading her by the hand; even the Coles turned out, Jeremy’s mother holding Kate’s hand—she was still too young to go to our school. My mother held my hand tightly, but I don’t think I even looked at her. I was looking at everyone else.

It was the first time I felt that I was missing something the other kids all had. For the first time, I could see that we were different, that there was something weird about me, something strange about my not having a father. And for the first time, it made me wonder—that same skin-itching, can’t-be-still sensation I feel now. I didn’t even realize yet that most kids had never lived with their grandparents. My mother and I used to curl up in her bed at Grandma’s and watch TV and eat ice cream until I fell asleep. I always woke up in my room; I guess she’d carry me there once I was sleeping. My grandmother disapproved; she thought my mother was babying me, that I was getting too old to cuddle like that. I never heard her say anything about it; I could just tell by the look on her face when she walked past my mother’s open door and saw us together. Now I assume she was silent because she felt sorry for us: her daughter, the widow, and her granddaughter, the half orphan.

I did not like this apartment when I saw it for the first time. At my grandmother’s apartment, my mother’s and my bedrooms were right next to each other. We shared a wall, so from my room, even with the door closed, I could hear Mom moving around; hear her voice on the phone, her radio in the background when she read. This apartment is laid out completely differently, with two bedrooms on opposite ends, each with its own bathroom. The kitchen and living room are in the middle, with an alcove for a dining room in between. It is an apartment for two people to be separated in. I didn’t like it. But my mother was so excited the day we moved in, I knew better than to say anything. My grandmother had helped her pick the apartment out. Maybe she thought its layout seemed good for a single woman and her child: we’d each have so much privacy. My grandmother’s cleaning lady was there to help us unpack; she still comes here once a week and uses the same cleaning products she uses at my grandmother’s, so our apartments smell the same. The day we moved in was the first time I was aware that my mother and I felt differently about the same thing: I was sad and she was excited. “You’ll be so close to your new school,” she said, squeezing my shoulders.

The afternoon after my first day of third grade, my mother came to pick me up. I’d calmed down, having mostly forgotten about what I’d seen that morning. Everyone else was picked up by their mothers too, or, if their mothers worked, by a nanny. But after we got home, after I’d watched TV and paged through the chapter book the teacher had promised we’d read soon, I began to have the same sensation that had gripped me that morning. There was something about me that was different—something I didn’t quite understand, something that made me nervous. The pages of the book seemed to stick together, and the words looked so big, and it seemed impossible that I would ever know what the letters meant when they were strung together. And I was a good reader—I’d been reading books more difficult than this all summer. I didn’t want to face the next morning at school, because what if the next morning, all the fathers would be there again and I’d have to be different again.

I had to tell my mother why I couldn’t go back. So I slid off my bed and walked across the apartment toward my mother’s bedroom. I still wasn’t used to what a long walk it was; we’d only been living here a couple of weeks. My mother’s door was closed, but I opened it without knocking; I’d never had to be bashful about going into Mom’s room at Grandma’s house. The lights were out and Mom was lying on her side, turned away from me. But she was above the covers and fully dressed, so I supposed she was awake.

“Mommy?”

She rolled over and flicked on the light next to the bed. Her eyes were very red, and her hair was frizzled.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

I climbed onto the bed and snuggled next to her. She still wears the same perfume. Sometimes, when I smell it, it takes me right back to her bed, to the pillowcases that smelled like her.

“I don’t want to go back to school tomorrow.”

Her face became alert, and I was relieved. I was worried that she’d tell me I had to go, but instead she looked genuinely concerned, like this was a grown-up problem.

“Did someone say something mean to you? Did the teacher say something?”

“No.” Why would my nice new teacher have said anything?

I could feel her body relaxing next to mine; could feel her arms around me becoming less stiff, her fingers loosening their grip on me. She brushed the hair out of my face. “Then what’s the matter, sweetheart?” And now it didn’t sound like she thought my problem was grown-up enough. I tried to explain.

“I’m different from the other kids.”

“Everybody’s different, sweetie,” she said, and even at that age, I knew she was patronizing me. I had to make her understand that I couldn’t go back.

“How come we don’t have a daddy like everyone else?” I knew, by then, that my father was dead and what it meant to be dead, but that didn’t explain why I didn’t have a father.

My mother’s arms became stiff again. Her face went white, and her hands held my arms so tight that it hurt—later I would see red marks where her fingernails had been. I don’t think she meant to hurt me; I don’t think she had control over her muscles at that moment.

I was terrified. My question had upset my mother like nothing I’d ever done. Worse than when I spilled cranberry juice on the sofa; worse than when I had knots in my hair that she had to untangle. She didn’t say anything, and all I wanted was to undo what I’d done.

So, in my infinite eight-year-old wisdom, I said, “It doesn’t matter, Mommy. I know it doesn’t matter. I’ll go back tomorrow. I promise.”

And this seemed to work. Her body relaxed, but not completely. I could feel the tension still in her muscles, like she was nervous, anxious, that I might ask again, even if it wouldn’t be for a very long time.

I left her room and went back to my book. That night, I fell asleep in my own bed. The next day, when she dropped me off, I let go of her hand and walked right into the school by myself, past the kids who were crying because they didn’t want to leave their moms, past the moms who were hugging their kids tight because their kids didn’t want to be left. I didn’t want my mom to worry about me. I would turn off whatever was inside me that made me wonder why we were different.

After that, my mother always walked me to school and always came to pick me up, and I always dropped her hand and went right in, and then came out and took her hand for the walk home later—exactly like the other kids I watched so closely. I believed I could keep her calm, could make her happy. I didn’t ever want to talk about my father again, and I didn’t ever want to feel that skin-itching curiosity over him again. If I could just make myself be normal, then there would be nothing to wonder about. I just had to figure out a way how.

And then, one day, Emily Winters came into school and told me that her parents were getting divorced. She said the word loudly, almost proudly, because it was a big grown-up word with all kinds of big grown-up implications.

I tried not to smile; I knew I shouldn’t smile at Emily’s very serious grown-up news. But I was excited, because here was the normalcy I’d been looking for. Lots of kids had divorced parents—there were two boys in our class whose parents were divorced, and at least three kids in the other third-grade class. This was a new school—no one here knew us from before, no one here knew my dad was dead. So I decided to lie.

“You know,” I said, “that makes us the only divorced girls in Mrs. Focious’s class.”

Emily seemed to think I was an expert on divorce. I told her my father left when I was only two, that I barely remembered him. No need to be curious anymore: now I was an expert; now there was nothing I didn’t know, because I got to make it up as I went along.

Emily said her father was moving to Chicago, but she’d still get to see him all the time. “He’s getting a big house with an extra room in it just for me. And he promises that he’s still going to visit all the time—he’ll even still pick me up from school sometimes.”

“That’s great,” I said wisely. My father had to be even farther away than Chicago, somewhere I couldn’t get to—far enough that it would make sense that I never saw him, that he never visited. It had to be another country. Europe was too cool, a place the lucky kids got taken to on vacation. I thought of South America, but that was too strange, too exotic; there’d be too many questions.

“My dad lives in Arizona,” I said, the lie rising easily in my throat.

“I’m actually really lucky,” Emily continued. “My parents are getting joint custody.” She said the new words slowly, as if they were big in her mouth. “My brother says that there’s a girl in his class who never sees her father, because her parents hated each other so much, they never wanted to have to see each other again.”

I jumped at the explanation. “That’s like my parents. I haven’t seen my dad once since he left.”

“Wow,” Emily said, her eyes growing wide. “That’s really bad.”

“Yeah,” I said, proud of myself for the lie, happy to be like the girl in her brother’s class. “But I’m used to it. It’s always just been me and my mom.”

Emily and I walked around holding hands for the rest of the day. When I got home, I almost told my mother about the lie. But my mother didn’t believe in lying; she’d told me a thousand times that good girls didn’t lie. So I didn’t tell her, even though I wanted her to know that I’d found the one lie that I was sure was allowed, the one lie that would make everything okay.

But, even though I never asked about my father again, things still weren’t the same. On the nights when I would go into her room to watch TV, my mother didn’t hold me like she used to, and we each got our own bowl of ice cream. When I turned nine, she bought a TV for my bedroom, so our nights of TV and ice cream became much fewer and further between. I knew if I said anything to her, it would just bring her back to that day on her bed, to her arms stiffening around me.

I invented a fairy godmother who’d stay with me until I fell asleep—no magic pumpkins, no glass slippers. Just imaginary arms around me until I slept. I looked forward to bedtime. I fantasized about the prince who would come to love me, and about the fairy godmother, always there, putting me into the carriage, arranging my dress just so. I still do; I still look forward to bedtime, and I still imagine my fairy godmother taking care of me; I play a movie of her in my head.

As soon as fifth grade started, I insisted on walking to and from school by myself, even though I didn’t know any other kids who got to walk alone so young. I lied to my mother and told her everyone else got to, and she believed me, even though she could easily have asked the other parents. We live so close to the school, maybe she was sure I’d be safe. Maybe she watched me from the living room window. When I look back on it, it’s amazing I never walked into oncoming traffic. I’d spend those few blocks completely inside my head, imagining my fairy godmother was walking with me. And having her with me, I felt safe. She made me brave. Once, I knew I’d gone too far when, after school, I forgot she wasn’t real and I poured two glasses of milk instead of just one. My mother was in the other room, hadn’t seen me do it, and presumably hadn’t heard me talking to the fairy godmother, but my cheeks were hot as I poured the extra milk into the sink. When I put the extra glass in the dishwasher, it felt like I was hiding something.