Other People's Houses, page 8
When she and Sara had been planning their wedding, Iris had been struck by how much attention was paid to getting married, and how little to staying married. Entire magazines were devoted to centerpieces and whimsical take-home trinkets, but where were the articles about getting used to the smell of each other’s poop? Where was the advice on how to end an argument about who was sicker when you both caught the same cold, or how to decide which one of you got up at night for the baby, or how to agree to put an old and suffering pet to sleep?
Similarly, when she was pregnant, there was such attention paid to labor and delivery, and so little to the first three months afterward, which made the pain of an episiotomy seem like a walk in the park. Split your vagina like a melon? Sure, but what about taking the first shit afterward? What about ninety nights with two hours of sleep and the argument all couples have in the second week when you realize this fucking baby is Never Leaving and all the help you have is That Useless Person Over There? Let’s get five hundred words on that, motherfucker.
Iris realized her mother was still waiting for an answer. “Because I haven’t found the right moment to bring it up. She seems really happy right now, and I guess I’m scared that if I ask her and she says no that I’m not sure what I would do.”
Her mother made a noise that was hard to describe. A sigh mixed with a click of the tongue and an ageless expression of resignation. “What could you do?”
“Not sure. That’s why I haven’t brought it up.” She poured the hot water over the tea bag, and watched the gossamer pyramid collapse.
Her mother asked, “How’s Frances?”
Iris smiled. “Same as ever. Happy.”
“Did she lose the weight?”
Iris rolled her eyes, but answered her mother anyway. “No, I don’t think so. She doesn’t look any different.” She waited for her mother to comment on how skinny Frances used to be. It was as predictable as sunrise.
“She used to be so skinny, didn’t she?”
“She did, yes. But she had kids.”
“Sure, but we all have kids. You have kids. You’re still skinny.”
Iris walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. Rosco threw himself down next to her. “I was never skinny, Mom. And I only have one child, she has three.”
“I had four. I kept my figure.”
“You’re not being very supportive. That’s your favorite niece you’re talking about.”
“You should hear what I say about my least favorite.” She laughed. “How’s that husband of hers? Still drinking too much?”
“You’re a horrible gossip.”
“If you’re talking about relations it’s not gossip, it’s family history.”
Iris bent to stroke her dog, who never repeated anything about anyone.
Eleven.
As Lili had foreseen, Ava opened her attack before her butt even hit the front seat.
“So, why were you at school?” She wedged her enormous backpack into the passenger floor space, moving her chair back until it caused Lally to squeak.
Frances looked in the rearview. Lally was half asleep, despite the squeak. Milo, Wyatt, and Theo were in the third row, reveling in the extra space because Kate was occupying Lucas’s usual seat. He had been picked up by Bill, whom Frances had only glimpsed in the distance. Dentist appointment, which Bill had alerted Frances to the week before. He was very on top of it, Bill was; maybe Julie had felt unnecessary.
Frances looked across at her daughter, whose face was calm enough. “I just wanted to talk to Jennifer about how you’re doing at school.”
“You’d already talked to me, wasn’t that enough? Jennifer doesn’t know anything.” Her fingers were tapping on the seat belt, little percussive noises that belied her quiet delivery.
“Is there something to know, Ava?” In the rearview she could see Milo’s eyes, watching her. He couldn’t hear very much from back there, but he could read their tone. She dropped her voice, “Maybe we should talk about this once we get home? We could just sit and . . .”
“Chat about how you’re invading my privacy? Sure, let’s grab a cup of tea and talk it through, shall we?” Her daughter turned to face the window and said nothing for the rest of the trip.
Frances sighed. “Yes, let’s have some tea.”
Once they were home and Ava had walked Kate, Theo, and Wyatt down the block to their houses, and Milo had gotten Lally and himself their inevitable bowl of Pirate’s Booty and had sat down with her for their regulation half hour of post-school TV, Frances carried two cups of tea up to Ava’s room.
Ava looked up, apparently surprised to see her mother. “Oh, are we really going to have tea?”
Fortunately, Frances knew she’d just been sitting there waiting to nonchalantly throw out that line, in the hopes of getting first blood. No dice.
“Yeah, I thought it would be a good idea.” Frances held up the tea. “But if you don’t want to, it’s fine.” She looked around the room at the early teenage mix of old horse posters and new rock star posters (similar hair styles), the blend of dolls and books and makeup. She understood why parents who lost their children kept their rooms just as they were: Every single thing in this room meant something. Either it meant something to her or it simply meant something to her because it meant something to Ava.
Ava took the tea and resettled herself on the bed, putting her laptop to one side, keeping one of her earbuds in, just in case she needed to do that “Oh, I’ve just been distracted by a notification, I’m going to let my gaze drift to the screen to underscore how unimportant this conversation is” move. Again, nice try.
“Both earbuds out and close the screen, OK? I want to talk to you, and I want to hear what you have to say.” Frances suddenly wondered if she should wait for Michael to come home, but it was a bit late to change tack now.
Ava rolled her eyes, but complied. Honestly, the eye-rolling thing just had to be developmental. There was no other explanation for its simultaneous appearance in pretty much one hundred percent of tweens and teens, all over the world. Three wisps of underarm hair, the first actual pimple, and eye rolling, all at once. Frances got a brief mental montage of teenage eyes rolling in the spotty faces of multitudinous nationalities, then returned her focus to the kid in front of her.
“I went to talk to Jennifer today, because your dad and I were worried that you didn’t seem to be bringing the same attention to school as you used to. It’s as simple as that.” She smoothed the coverlet, flicking a crumb to the floor.
“As simple as ‘My kid is failing, what are you going to do about it’?” Ava pulled her legs up under her, just in case her mother’s smoothing hand got too close.
“No, you’re not failing. You’re just not succeeding.”
Ava snorted. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
Frances shook her head. “No, and you understand what I’m saying and what I mean, and there’s no point pretending you don’t. Look, lovely.” She put her hand on Ava’s knee, but her daughter twitched it away, frowning. “We love you, and want to help you, that’s all. It’s our job.”
“Well, how about I fire you?”
Frances smiled. “You can’t. It’s a lifetime appointment. We have tenure.”
Ava wasn’t smiling. “I never hired you.”
“We were appointed at birth. Your birth.”
“How come Milo gets a pass?”
“He doesn’t, but our expectations for him are different from our expectations for you. He’s ten. We expect him to lower the toilet seat after peeing, eat his vegetables, and that’s about it.”
“You weren’t that easy on me.” Ava’s eyes were glittering, but Frances couldn’t tell if it was tears or rage.
“Yes, we were. Easier, maybe, because you were the first and therefore we didn’t know how mean we could be. Poor Lally’s going to be sweeping chimneys by the time she’s eight.”
Again, no smile. Usually humor would breach her dam of irritation, her hormonal wall of ice. Frances waited.
“Lally gets away with everything.” This was clutching at straws. Ava doted on Lally, and the feeling was mutual. When Lally had been a baby Ava had been ten, and for a brief period it was only Ava who could stop her from fussing. It had been instant glory, witnessed multiple times by various members of the family, and the connection was still there.
“She’s four. Are you suggesting we send her to college? Should Milo be looking for work in the financial sector?” Frances tried to touch Ava again, but she still held herself too far away. “Darling, we want all of you to be happy, and that means different things at four than it does at fourteen.”
“What is it supposed to mean for me, then?” Frances could hear an actual question in Ava’s voice, rippling across the surface belligerence. She really wondered what happy should mean for her, and Frances remembered that feeling well. She smiled and tried to soften her tone.
“We expect you to work hard at school, get enough to eat, get more sleep than you seem to want, and to have a social life. Not a continuous round of parties and sleepovers because that would mess with the first three, but fun is allowed and indeed encouraged.” Frances looked at the face she knew better than her own, watching for clues as to what Ava was thinking. She would get a tiny indentation at the corner of her mouth when she was trying not to cry. She fisted up her hands when she was getting frustrated. She stopped blinking so much when she was about to throw a total shitter. So far her blink rate appeared normal, but Frances was ready to duck. “And we also want you to tell us what’s going on with you, to keep communicating with us.”
“How is that supposed to make me happy? Aren’t I allowed a private life?”
“Of course you are. Everyone is. But we’re here to help you, to support you, like a pit crew, but without the jumpsuits and awesome whirry wheel-changing tools. We can’t do that if you don’t tell us what you need.”
“What if I don’t need anything?”
“We all need something. No one gets out of here alone, babe.” Why was this so hard, why was her child resisting her so much, so furiously? When she was small Frances had been her everything, and now she seemed to resent her mother’s very existence.
“But what if what I need is to be left alone?” Ava’s tiny indentation was there now, at the corner of her mouth, but so was the reduced blinking. The teenager was fighting herself for control.
Frances tried something else. “Have some tea.”
“I don’t want any fucking tea.”
Pause. Crap, now Frances needed to make one of those snap parenting decisions that she so frequently got wrong. She should have waited for Michael. Should she get angry at the cursing? Should she not? Two milliseconds, three milliseconds, four milliseconds . . .
“Then don’t have any fucking tea.”
Ava rarely heard her mother swear, except occasionally in the car, and this was startling enough to provoke a small smile. Frances doubled down, as this seemed to have been successful. “How about some fucking cocoa?”
Ava’s smile widened. “Nah, tea’s fine.” Her nascent tears seemed to be under control, and she took a sip and blinked at a normal rate. Frances cheered inwardly, and was tempted to get up and walk away while she was ahead, even though she hadn’t done anything except get her daughter to smile and drink tea. Seriously, some days that might be as good as it got. But then she remembered her conversation with Jennifer, and decided to press on.
She softened her tone, tried to sound open and nonjudgmental. “Jennifer said you’ve dropped your extracurriculars . . . What’s up there?”
In the blink of an eye the smile was gone. Ava scowled. “What’s up? Nothing’s up. The extracurriculars were (a) boring and (b) time consuming, and now I’ll have more time to do my precious homework. Isn’t that what you want?”
Frances shrugged. Maybe it was contagious. She’d be rolling her eyes next. “If you need more time to do your homework then it’s good you gave yourself that time.”
“Because I’m too stupid to do my homework in a regular amount of time?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “No, you were the one who mentioned homework.”
“Because that’s all you care about.”
“No, all I care about is you. I thought you liked working on the newspaper.”
“They got a new editor. It wasn’t me. I quit.”
Frances was surprised. “Because of that?”
Frances could tell Ava wanted very badly to look at her computer screen and feign indifference; her hand even drifted toward the laptop. “No, I just didn’t enjoy it anymore.”
“And the animation club?”
“Flip-book shit. It was stupid.”
“And the orchestra?”
There was a pause. Frances watched her daughter’s face. Ava was clearly trying to remember if she’d said she was doing a rehearsal the previous week, which she had, and wondering whether or not Frances had realized she hadn’t been. It was quite the little opera of facial expressions, and in the end the teenager decided to roll the dice.
“Yeah, that, too. I went last week, but I’m not going to go anymore.”
Frances pondered. Should she call her on the lie, wait for Michael to come home and discuss it with him, or let it slide right now but come at it another way?
She plunged on. “Oh yeah? Jennifer thought you’d stopped a couple of weeks ago. But you told me you were at rehearsal last week, right?”
Ava shrugged and frowned. “Did I?” She reached for her tea, took a sip.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. What did you do instead?” There, that was straightforward. You know and I know that you said you were at rehearsal and we both know you weren’t, so tell me the truth. Good, right? Right?
“Nothing. Hanging out in the library I guess. I forget.”
Ah. Fuck. A sideways bluff, a teenage classic. Maybe I was doing something you wouldn’t like, maybe I wasn’t, I don’t remember. How much do you want to push this, Parent? We can both walk away at this point, the pothole covered over, appearances preserved. Wouldn’t that be the easier choice? Go on, let it go.
Frances didn’t want to let it go. Her own parents had been masters of the “everything’s fine here, move along, nothing to see” while at the same time being so incredibly miserable and fucked up they could barely breathe. They’d never recovered from losing her brother, but everyone in the neighborhood thought they were doing really well, so brave, an inspiration.
“I don’t believe you. If you quit a couple of weeks ago then you’ve been ‘at rehearsal’ at least twice since then, and I’m pretty sure you stayed late at least one other day.” Frances raised her eyebrows. “What’s going on, Ava? I’m not angry. I just want to know what’s up.”
Ava looked at her mother, a momentary look of hurt almost immediately replaced with anger.
“My private life is none of your business.”
“Yes, it kind of is. I don’t need color pictures, a verbal overview is fine. Are you seeing someone? Are you doing drugs? Are you counterfeiting money under the bleachers?”
Which was when the gasket blew, and all the way off. Ava sat up and pointed her finger, her face flushing. “You think you’re funny, don’t you? You’re always so ready to make a joke, to make it seem like we’re all so cool and relaxed here, sharing goals, working as a team, whatever theory you’ve gleaned from whatever parenting book or podcast you’ve listened to recently.” Ava looked at Frances with a more than reasonable facsimile of disdain. “You’re no different from anyone else’s parents, Mom, just a prying, fat old woman whose own life is essentially over and who needs to run their kids’ lives to distract themselves from imminent menopause.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, physically escalating the conflict while giving herself space to swing.
Frances took a breath and stayed down. At moments like this she felt sorrow in a way she never experienced in any other context. Sorrow for herself because, let’s face it, that shit was hurtful, and sorrow that she had failed at parenting so badly that her child was capable of such cruelty. She knew Ava saved her harshest words for her, she knew that intellectually, but she also knew that those feelings were real, that at points like this Ava genuinely didn’t like her very much.
“That’s not true, and it’s very mean. I just asked you a reasonable question. There’s no need to make a federal case of it. Just tell me what you were doing, and why you’re lying to me about it.” Frances really hadn’t wanted this conversation to go this way. “I don’t think of you as a liar, Ava. Please just tell me what’s going on with you.”
“Nothing. I already told you. I hung out at the library and did my homework. There’s nothing.”
“Why did you tell me you were at rehearsal?”
Yet another shrug. “Because it was easier than explaining why I wasn’t.”
“Which you still haven’t explained. And who’s Piper?” Don’t get angry, Frances. The minute you get angry, the minute you raise your voice, you lose the argument and everyone ends up in tears and the emotional hangover the next day is such a bastard.
Ava crossed her room to sit in her scruffy, oversize armchair, a fixture since she’d been born. She’d been nursed there, rocked there, read to for years and years. Now it was her own nest, and as she pulled her legs up tightly, Frances could see her thinking hard and trying not to lose the fight. Winning mattered so much to her because she hadn’t yet realized that she and Frances were on the same side. “Piper is nobody. Just a girl at school who liked me and doesn’t like me anymore.”
