Other People's Houses, page 9
“‘Liked’ in the romantic sense?”
Ava deepened her scorn, if that were possible. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? If I was gay like Iris? It would be so easy to look cool then, you could just be like, ‘Yeah, my kid’s gay, it’s fine, as long as she’s happy.’ You’d be so accepting and right-on about it.”
Frances felt her temper rising. “And that would be bad? I should throw you out of the house instead?”
“No.” Ava tossed her head, looking momentarily like the piebald in the poster above the chair. “Oh, never mind, Mom. You don’t even know what you don’t know.”
Count to three. “And what about the orchestra?”
“I quit because I wanted to have more time. I want to have some space, for crying out loud. I need time to myself, time that is just mine.” Suddenly, she had tears in her eyes. “Everyone knows where I am and what I’m doing all the time. I have a schedule on the wall. I have organized activities. I have about as much freedom as someone on death row and that’s pretty much how I feel. I just want to have something private, something only I know, and a little fucking room to breathe.” She turned and buried her face in a pillow that said “No Bad Days” on it in fluffy letters. “I just want you to leave me alone!”
Frances reached for her. “Ava, I . . .”
From the pillow, desperately, “Mom, I’m not speaking hypothetically. I want you to leave me alone now. Just go away. I hate you!”
Frances got up and walked out, almost in tears herself.
That went well.
* * *
• • •
To add insult to injury, even though it wasn’t needed, Michael was annoyed with Frances for going ahead without him.
“I thought we agreed to talk to each other before talking to Ava?”
Frances was sitting on their bed, surrounded by dogs as usual. She nodded. “I know, it just . . . I should have waited. I didn’t think it would go that badly, that quickly.” They kept their voices low, but Michael wasn’t one of those people who needed volume to make his displeasure felt. He wrinkled his eyebrows at her.
“Do we even have a theory about why she dropped her extracurriculars? Do we know anything about this Piper girl? Has she ever mentioned her?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember it, but that isn’t cast iron. Those first weeks of school are always such a clusterfuck. Three different schools this year, all new names, I’m surprised I remember who’s teaching which kid.”
Michael looked at his wife, who was hiding behind Jack and Diane. He loved her very much, but he found himself increasingly mystified by her relationship with Ava. For his own part, he found the teenage girl living in his house as confusing as the ones he’d gazed at as a teenager. He hadn’t understood them then, and barely any of them would even deign to talk to him. When his kids brought home friends he could never tell them apart. They all looked like critters to him, just fast-moving blurs of hair.
“Was that Bella?” he would ask, and Frances or Ava would roll their eyes and say, “No, that was Quinn, they’re completely different!” and he would shrug. He knew his own kids at a vast distance, or from the corner of his eye, and that would just have to do. He loved them unreservedly, especially Ava, who was the most like him. But his conversations with her were completely different from the ones she and Frances had.
Early on Frances had told him something he’d taken very much to heart. “You,” she’d said, “are the alpha man in your daughter’s life. You are the model. Every other man in her life will be measured against you, and her relationships will be measured against ours. If you speak to her disrespectfully she will accept that level of shit from a future boyfriend.” She’d paused and smiled at him. “No pressure.” He tried hard, and largely spoke to Ava about neutral things, or things they both agreed on, or sometimes he would just listen to her rattle on about whatever she wanted to rattle on about. He would be sitting there and suddenly that conversation with Frances would pop into his head, and he would get anxious: Am I being supportive? Am I understanding her and encouraging her to share her thoughts? Would I be OK with a future boyfriend treating her this way . . . ? But then he would get so irritated at the thought of some future dickhead treating his daughter badly that he would drift off, and suddenly Ava would be looking at him silently with one eyebrow raised. D’oh.
But Ava always cut him slack, something she was apparently never prepared to do for Frances. Any tiny error, any thoughtless word, and Ava would be all over Frances like white on rice. He could see how much it stressed Frances out, but then he could also see how her stress made it worse, how caring about Ava too much was preventing her from letting that shit wash over her.
He went over and sat on the bed next to her, stroking the dogs’ heads and reaching for Frances’s hand. “Honey, you just need to back off a bit.”
“I try!” Frances pulled her hand away. “It doesn’t matter what I do, I get into trouble every time we speak. It’s like walking blindfolded through a field of, I don’t know, exploding things in the ground.”
Michael frowned. “A minefield?”
There was a pause. “Yes, a minefield. Jesus, it doesn’t help that I’m clearly developing a brain tumor the size of a fucking tangerine.” She rested her head on her husband’s chest, over the head of Diane, who stuck her nose up and tried to lick their chins. “You’d be much better at this than I am, so maybe that would be for the best.”
Michael hugged her. “Look, I get to be the guest star, the occasional cameo appearance. And, unlike on old episodes of Columbo, I don’t always have to be the bad guy.”
“I miss Columbo.”
“I’m sure they have it on Netflix.”
“What if it isn’t as good as I remember it?”
“Few things are.”
“I love you.”
He grinned above her head. “I know.”
* * *
• • •
Anne was in the bathroom, washing her face, the grains dissolving as they always did. Charlie was sitting in the bedroom watching Theo and Kate playing some game or other on the iPad. Anne could tell from Kate’s tone of voice that things were about ten minutes away from going supercritical. She’d take eight of those minutes to finish in the bathroom and then walk out and pull the irons out of the fire just in time. What a heroine she was. She made a face at herself in the mirror and heard Theo’s voice in the other room say, “Who’s Richard?”
She clutched the side of the sink and her hand slipped in the water she was washing her face with. Lurching forward she almost cracked her head on the mirror. Her blood turned to ice, a phrase she’d never understood until that very second, and she heard Charlie say, “No idea, is it something in the game?” He didn’t sound all that interested.
Theo sounded puzzled. “No, he just texted me.”
Please, God.
“What did he say?”
“‘Are you there?’”
“That’s all he said? Is that my iPad or Mommy’s?”
“I don’t know.”
No, really, please, God.
Charlie sighed. “Show me.”
Anne looked at her reflection and listened to the last seconds of her old life ticking away. She looked so old stooping over the sink, her ratty kitten pajamas—a Mother’s Day gift from the kids—a little damp on the front, her quivering arms barely holding her up. She looked like a dog about to vomit, hunched, fearful. No one will ever know.
Charlie’s voice again. “It’s Mommy’s iPad . . .” He raised his voice. “Hey, Anne, did you know you’re getting texts on the iPad? Does that mean you’re not getting them on your phone?”
She could speak. “No idea, babe.” She sounded totally normal. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know, some guy named Richard?”
“Huh . . . I don’t know anyone called Richard. Maybe it’s a wrong number.” My voice couldn’t sound more innocent and disinterested.
“Can I have it back, Dad?”
There was a tiny pause, and Anne could almost see the small frown on Charlie’s face, followed by the usual microshrug and casting aside of worry. It was his way. She loved him for it, ironically enough.
“Sure, here you go.” Another pause. “Nearly time for bed, though, OK?”
Anne rested her forehead against the mirror in the bathroom and willed herself not to smash it there, killing the selfish monster who threatened her family.
Instead she reached for her dressing gown and walked out to lie to their faces.
Twelve.
Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins . . .
Frances had a Beatles song stuck in her head and sang it under her breath as she blundered into the bathroom, everyone else still sleeping. The dogs followed her, wondering if this morning they would get fed in the bathroom; it paid to keep an open mind.
She looked at herself in the mirror, naked and sheet-marked. Not too bad, she thought, turning. Yeah, OK, there were definitely thirty extra pounds, but first thing in the morning it all tended to hold together, and not . . . fold so much. By the end of the day, having been squeezed into jeans and a bra and sitting and standing and driving, she looked like a transit map, lines intersecting pinkly in hubs and spokes. She’d been very slender as a young woman, and clearly remembered looking at herself in a mirror at the age of twenty-four, not an ounce of fat, not a hint that gravity operated on her the same as everyone else, and pledging that if she ever saw even the first hint of cellulite she wouldn’t ignore it, but would work that shit off right away.
Frances made a face, remembering the idiocy of her younger self. She’d stayed slender until she had kids, then she’d gained with each pregnancy and not completely lost, and now she was overweight in her midforties, with a muffin top that rivaled any artisanal bakery in town. And did she give a fuck? No, zero fucks given. Except for every thirty or forty minutes, when she would catch sight of herself in a store window or mirror and scowl inwardly, scolding herself for being lazy, fat, unattractive, old, past-it, unsexy, uninteresting, invisible yet glaringly, obesely obvious as she lumbered around the world, an insult to the media and good women everywhere. Yeah, apart from those punctuating moments of vicious self-criticism, zero fucks given.
But so far this morning, she felt fine. She had the opposite of body dysphoria, maybe. She looked at herself and basically thought she looked good. Body euphoria? It didn’t feel that good . . . The dogs loved her regardless, as they told her continuously, pressing their heads under her hands, gazing up at her . . . You’re fantastic, said their liquid eyes, their waving tails, we just can’t get over how terrific you are in every way, we’re so glad to have chosen you as our leader.
She pulled on her jeans, looked at her mom-butt in the mirror—seriously, how did she suddenly have such a wide ass, what was wrong with her—then pulled on a sweatshirt which covered it. See? No mom-butt here. Just a cool hoodie. Suck it, internal critic. Suck it all the way.
She headed down the stairs, the dogs apparently attempting to kill her at every step, pushing behind her in a clattering fall of fur and claws. She saw the cat sitting on the sofa, waiting. Ah, his smooth outline said, I see the servants are awake.
Frances put on the coffee, humming, then pulled the dogs’ dishes from the dishwasher, having let them both out the back door to take a shit she could step in later. Carlton the cat sauntered in, timing his arrival perfectly with Frances putting fresh kibble in his bowl, up on a counter where the dogs couldn’t get it. She loved this cat. He was old and predated everyone in the house except Michael. His purr was rusty and only for her, his fur slightly thicker and more matted than it had been when she’d brought him home from the shelter sixteen years earlier. The dogs were scared of him, his orange tiger stripes conveying danger just as they should, and he sauntered around the house unmolested.
The dogs came back in, the coffee dripped into the pot, the lights were on, she could hear Ava moving around upstairs, facing her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Frances hoped her daughter saw how beautiful she was, but doubted it. She herself, like every woman she knew, only recognized her own youthful perfection in retrospect, with deep regret not for losing it but for not seeing it at the time. Frances tried to remember this every time she criticized herself—one day she would be eighty, God willing, and she was ready to bet she’d look at herself then and long for the strength and bone density of forty-six.
Frances thought of Anne. A few houses away she was also wandering around her kitchen, packing lunches (although she could be that mom, the one who assembled them the night before and only did the sandwich at the last minute, to prevent sogginess), drinking coffee, singing Beatles songs under her breath. Or maybe she was doing a light yoga workout, from memory, wearing strappy bamboo yoga wear that didn’t leave a mark on her flesh because she didn’t have any fat, because she worked it all off fucking a teenager and darting around like the cheating cow she was. Frances chided herself for being a bitch, and Ava came in.
“Morning, lovely,” said Frances.
“Yello,” replied her daughter, which was a neutral to medium-friendly response. Frances looked sideways at her, trying to gauge her mood. She’d left her alone the previous night, falling asleep herself before Ava had, which was a pretty common occurrence these days. Had she gotten over her bad mood, or was Frances still on her shit list?
Ava had the fridge door open. “Are you going to the store later?”
“Does the day have a Y in it?”
Ava smiled. “Can you get some more string cheese with the stuff wrapped around it?”
“Prosciutto?”
“Yeah.” She pulled out from the fridge, shutting the door. “I’m about to eat the last one.”
“Sure.” Frances made a mental note. Those particular snacks came from a different market from the usual one; she’d have to make a special trip. None of her family noticed the various efforts she made on their behalf, hunting for new foods for them to try, picking up their favorite flavors of this and that, pouncing on the rarities they favored, the Japanese candy, the artisanal brand of root beer, the slightly nicer-than-usual wine she picked out for Michael, though she didn’t like red wine herself.
Before there was Pinterest there were magazines that showed happy women providing beautiful things for their families to enjoy, and despite her intelligence she was just as much a sucker as anyone else. She wanted a bright yellow pitcher of wooden spoons on her white marble counter, she wanted tall French windows that looked out over green valleys, she wanted a pair of strappy ballet flats that ribboned up her slender calves as she romped about town in artfully shabby dungarees that somehow took twenty pounds off her. Instead she had a jar of dog-chewed wooden spoons, windows that hadn’t been washed since the first Obama administration, and if she’d put on a pair of dungarees she would have been mistaken for a plumber. A male plumber. However, she did maintain a world-class snack cupboard.
Ava came close, leaned over to be kissed, and went back upstairs. Frances listened to her footsteps as long as she could hear them.
Stepping outside she is free . . .
Anne’s kids were younger, so maybe she didn’t think about losing them as frequently as Frances thought about life after Ava was gone. As her eldest had turned into a teenager Frances and Michael could feel her getting ready to leave, all her energy pivoting toward the exit. It was palpable, the change in attitude. Sometimes it hurt to think of Ava picking a college, picking a boyfriend, picking a city to move to, and other times it filled them both with pride to think of the young woman she was turning into. Mind you, Frances thought, as she heard Lally calling her from upstairs, a stick of cheese for breakfast wasn’t going to cut it out in the real world.
* * *
• • •
Actually, Anne wasn’t doing yoga, she was throwing up and trying not to let anyone hear. She’d filled the toilet with toilet paper and draped a towel over her head to muffle the retching. She’d woken at 4:00 a.m., the universal hour of regret and recrimination. She knew she’d come dangerously close to being caught, to losing trust she didn’t deserve to have, and she knew she had to break it off once and for all. She’d tried before, and failed, but that was when she was only fighting her own willpower. Now she knew she was fighting Karma, and that bitch carried a big stick and forgot nothing.
Light was starting to come through the skylight above her head as she lay on the floor, the cold tiles flecked with bile. In a moment her morning alarm would go off, and she needed to get her ass off the bathroom floor and go prevent it from waking Charlie. She had to gather herself, wake the children, make the lunches (she’d been too freaked out to do it the night before as usual), put on the kettle for her morning coffee, check the backpacks for things she was supposed to sign, hunt for shoes. She must pretend it was all OK, that there was no possibility at all that her heart would burst and kill her where she stood. What if she died? What if Richard showed up at her funeral and the children turned to Charlie and asked who the tall crying guy was? This thought propelled her to her feet, and as she shuddered one last time over the toilet, a cold sweat spreading the smell of burning metal through the room, she prayed this was the last day of this part of her life.
* * *
• • •
Lucas wanted to know what made Fruity Pebbles change the milk all rainbowy. Bill said, “Chemicals,” but Lucas wasn’t satisfied.
