“Stop staring. You’re making me feel weird.”
“This is your house?”
“Yeah.”
We get out of the car. The neighborhood is utterly silent. No kids bicycling, no ice-cream truck, no motorcycle kickback from the college kids down the street. Our footsteps echo as we walk up to the door and Georgia unlocks it.
The house is just as impressive inside as it is outside, and equally silent. Georgia leads me through a two-story entrance hall and a massive den with shining velvet couches before reaching the kitchen, which actually takes my breath away. My mother would faint if she saw it. It is huge and pristine, everything in its place, and the appliances gleam in the afternoon light. Like our kitchen, it opens onto a back deck, but unlike ours, this deck has a set of lawn chairs with an umbrella and—down a few sets of stairs—its own pool.
“Holy shit, Georgia,” I finally say. She fidgets next to me. “Why don’t we come here all the time?”
“I know what it looks like,” she says. I step closer to the back window and look down. The pool is a perfect rectangle, its edges squared off in blue tile. She stays standing behind me. “But my parents get really mad if anything’s messy. They prefer everything to be…as it is. We couldn’t hang out here like we do at your place.”
“We could clean up after ourselves.”
“They would find something. Trust me.” She walks over to the fridge and opens it, peering inside. “I would ask if you want some dinner, but there’s nothing good here. My mom started buying me these premade meals from some fancy-ass weight loss company, and they’re the worst.”
As she holds the fridge open, I can see two items pinned on the door: a blank office calendar and a thin, long line of magnetized color that looks a little like a thermometer. The very top is green, a little piece underneath that is yellow, and the rest is red. A small silver magnet sits in the middle of the green zone.
Georgia closes the door and notices me looking. “That’s the Chart,” she says, capitalizing the word with her voice. “Green, I get to do whatever I want. Yellow is the danger zone, early curfew, no allowance. Red is grounded. Updated weekly.” I must look confused because she rolls her eyes and says, “During the school year, it’s about grades. My current average across all my classes. Ninety-five or higher is green. My parents used to let me give it up in the summer, but now it’s based on my most recent SAT practice score. I take them every Sunday.”
I pause for a moment, taking all this in. “Jesus,” I say as I start to do the math. “An entire test? But those things take…what, four hours?”
“Yeah,” she says, gloomy. I look around. The calendar and the Chart are the only things on the fridge. But hung on the walls all around the kitchen—and, now I think about it, the entryway and living room we walked through—are small canvas paintings, none larger than a poster.
They aren’t exactly fine art. The brushstrokes are either tentative and awkward or bold and careless, the colors are occasionally muddy, and the scenes aren’t anything to write home about. Some are generic landscapes of mountains or beaches, neither of which exist near our town. Others are images of Bonneville’s most iconic landmarks: a church, a statue, and a downtown office building constructed by a semi-famous architect in his fading years.
There’s something else weird about the paintings that I can’t put my finger on until I do a full scan across the room, think back through the rest of the rooms we walked through, and realize that there are two of every single scene.
Georgia notices me looking. “Ah,” she says, “you’ve seen our art.”
“What the hell is all this?”
“The results of approximately a year and a half of weekend couple sessions at the Bonneville Bev‘n’Brush,” Georgia says. “It’s this place where you go and drink wine for two hours while they teach you how to paint. Except they don’t teach you how to paint, exactly, they teach you how to make one specific painting.”
I walk closer to the nearest canvas, an eleven-by-seventeen portrait of a pine tree. “Your parents do this together?” I ask.
“Fuck no. My dad would hate it. He goes out with his running group while I go there with my mom.”
“But you can’t drink wine.”
“That is true. But Mom makes me come with her anyway, and we pay the child rate for me. It’s weird because everyone else is actually a couple, we’re the only mother-daughter pair. But a friend of hers did a birthday party there a few years ago, and Mom totally fell in love with it. She says it’s the most relaxing thing ever. And she works so much that she really does need to relax.”
I move across the kitchen to the identical copy of the tree. Where the first tree’s needles were small and precise, with several shades of green and brown, this one is rendered in big, sloppy strokes, like a child painted it. “Let me guess,” I say. “You did this one?”
“Nope,” Georgia says, “I did the one you were looking at first.”
I look at her, questioning. She shrugs.
“Mom always gets kinda tipsy. Whereas I actually find it stressful. I want to get it right, you know? But she loves it so much, and it’s one of the biggest ways we spend time together, so I still go with her.”
“Huh,” I say, looking at the paintings again. Georgia shifts her weight, following my gaze.
“Let’s go up to my room now,” she says. She scampers out of the kitchen and up a set of back stairs I didn’t notice.
I’m expecting a hallway or maybe a playroom at the top of the stairs. But instead, Georgia turns at the landing, throws her arms open, and says, “Welcome.” The staircase enters directly into her bedroom, which is as big as our den, wall-to-wall windows facing out onto the pool. Unlike the rest of the house, which is so clean it’s almost eerie, this room looks like a pack of feral dogs has run through it. Clothes, books, and papers are everywhere, covering the carpet so thickly that there have been actual paths carved through it: stairs to bed, bed to desk, desk to bathroom, bathroom to closet.
The walls are just as messy, in their own way. She has taped things floor to ceiling: photographs, posters, notes, pictures torn out from magazines, and then weirder stuff—business cards, menus, advertisements. Some of those Bev‘n’Brush canvases hang crookedly from nails among the papers and photos taped to the wall. She does not have a bulletin board. The room is the bulletin board.
“It’s the blessing and the curse of the Chart,” Georgia says, looking at me to see my reaction. “As long as I keep my grades up and I don’t leave clutter around the rest of the house, my parents don’t care if I clean in here.”
“Georgia, this room is unbelievable,” I manage. “Your house is unbelievable.”
“Well,” she says, awkward, “it’s not all that great.” She cocks her head down the way we came. “No door.” Then she nods to the other side of the room, where there is a door set into the wall beside the bed. “And that leads down the hall to my parents’ offices and their bedroom. But it doesn’t have a lock. So, lots of space to do whatever I want with, but no privacy.” She shrugs, self-conscious, and goes to sit on the bed. She tangles her fingers again, grabs a pillow and presses it against her chest. “I guess you see why I didn’t want you to come over.”
“Are you kidding? This place is great,” I say, moving farther into the room, turning to take in everything on the walls and that stunning view out the window. “When are your parents coming home? I wanna meet them.”
Georgia sighs. “Oh, it depends,” she says. “Sometime between seven and ten thirty. It varies. This is a busy time for both of them. I’d guess we probably won’t see them tonight. They work late during the week so we can hang out all together on weekends. That’s why I never see you on the weekends, by the way. I mean, I know you’re hanging out with Jake most of the time, but still. Gotta spend some time with my parents.”
I am not sure what to say to this
. It makes me think of the house as an enormous, beautiful box with Georgia rattling around in it alone, like a firefly cupped in someone’s hands. I wish my parents were less overbearing about Jake, but I still like seeing them before I go to bed. It is unfathomable to me to come home to someplace so quiet.
Georgia fills the silence by flopping back on her bed and pulling out her phone. “Even if they do come home, though, those weight-loss meals are the worst, so we should probably order some food,” she says.
“I cannot see another pizza,” I say, thankful for her ability to change the subject. I feel awkward and guilty and like I want to hug her. I lie on the bed beside her and watch her flip through her contacts. Beside us, a stack of SAT and college reference books teeters on the nightstand.
“I don’t understand that about you, but I respect it. How about that Italian place off Highway 80? They deliver.”
I give her a look.
“What? They make more than pizza. You can get a salad. I’ll get pasta. All good.”
She calls Buona Tavola and places our order. You can tell she’s a regular—she asks the person on the other end how their dog’s surgery went.
I walk around the room, looking at the walls, while she talks. There are pictures of Georgia as a baby, as a child, as a slightly younger teenager with braces. Pictures of her wearing medals at swim meets and with her arms wrapped around girls I don’t know, her friends from school. I see her parents for the first time too: the three of them laughing at Christmas, her mom standing behind her as she holds up a spelling bee trophy, her dad with his arm around her shoulder as they dangle their legs in the pool. There’s one of Georgia and her mom in an art studio that I can only imagine is the Bev‘n’Brush, both beaming and holding their paintbrushes in front of them like crossed swords.
She hangs up and says, “Forty minutes.” She gives me an exaggerated sigh. “But I’m starving now. Do you wanna play foosball?”
She leads me down the hallway to the game room, and I get a peek inside her parents’ offices and their bedroom—each its own ornate, orderly world, crystalline in its cleanliness. We play foosball and she beats me easily, though I start to get better with each passing game.
“It’s really hard to play this by yourself,” she says breathlessly, having whooped me a sixth time. “I’ve tried. Way better with another person.”
The doorbell rings with our food before I have a chance to respond.
At my request, we sit outside by the pool while we eat, dangling our feet in the water. I’m around water all day, but it feels different here, with no screaming kids or smudged glass separating us. Even Georgia admits it’s nice.
I tell her about how weird it was to date Jake during the school year when he wasn’t in school anymore, how my friends would get quiet and judgmental when I told them he wasn’t a college student. She tells me she’s never had a boyfriend, never even gone on a date, and when I say the guys at Eastern don’t deserve her, she laughs and says, “True.” She discusses her frustrations with her best friend at school, Katie. She only talks about herself, Georgia says, and she is too competitive about grades. I try to explain the way my friends have drawn away from me over the past year. I feel like an open door, as if I can say anything at all and it will disappear safely into Georgia and the clear turquoise water beneath us. Anything except the biggest thing—September.
We talk until it gets dark and then keep talking, lying down with our feet still in the water and staring up as the stars come out. Only when all the blue and purple light has drained from the sky do I hear a car pull into the driveway, then see the lights come on inside the house.
Georgia and I dry our legs with the remaining napkins from the to-go bag, and she leads me back up the stairs. She opens the sliding door just wide enough to slip through, and I follow, closing it behind me.
“Hey, Mom,” she says.
I turn to my left, toward the end of the kitchen, and see a woman straighten up from the sink. Georgia’s mother: a perfect simulacrum of Georgia, if she were a supermodel. The woman is tiny, even shorter than she looked in the pictures on Georgia’s wall, and remarkably thin. She’s wearing heels and a gray pantsuit, and she walks swiftly over to us. You can tell she started the day wearing a lot of makeup, but it’s faded, and there are purple loops underneath her eyes that make her look a couple of steps beyond exhausted.
“Hey, Georgia,” she says to her daughter as she approaches. She gives Georgia a big, tight hug, then holds out her hand to me. “Jessica Lee. Pleased to meet you…”
“Caroline,” I fill in the blank quickly. Her grip is strong and hard, all bones, and her eyes are so intense I have to focus on a spot just beneath her chin. “It’s nice to meet you too, Mrs. Lee.”
She does not correct me back to the informal Jessica, like my mom always does. Instead, she says, “Georgia tells me you work at the aquarium with her?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “In the gift shop, though. I’m not a counselor.”
“You like it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“From what Georgia says, those kids are hellacious. Must be nice not to deal with them.” She smiles a little, but in my peripheral vision, Georgia looks uncomfortable.
She turns and goes back to the refrigerator, pulling out a silver container. She is about to close the door when she does a double take, and her gaze flickers over the items inside.
“Georgia,” she says, sounding openly exasperated, “you know we had plenty of those NutriPlus meals. Did you get delivery again?”
Beside me, Georgia shrinks into herself. Her lips start to form the lie, and I know she’s no good at it. I jump in.
“Mrs. Lee, I’ve actually been craving Buona Tavola all week. I asked Georgia if we could order in. I’m really sorry.”
Her gaze switches from Georgia to me. “No problem, Caroline. Next time, you’re welcome to anything in the fridge. No need to spend money on takeout. We could all stand to eat a little healthier.” She sighs and puts the container into the microwave. “Georgia, your dad should be home in half an hour or so. He had a client dinner. I know it’s late, but he wanted to watch an episode of that new show we were talking about, the nature one? The episode about the peregrine falcon?”
I sneak a glance at Georgia. She’s wearing an expression I’ve never seen on her before: part shame, part love, part exhaustion.
“Mom,” she says, “you know it’s your rule that I’m supposed to be in bed by eleven. Plus, I do actually love sleeping.”
Mrs. Lee releases a breath, opening the microwave to poke at its contents, then closing it and setting it for another minute. She turns around.
“I know,” she says. “Maybe just the first half, then.”
Georgia throws up her hands. “But then how will I know what happens to the falcon?”
Her mom gives us the first real smile I’ve seen on her. “Fair. We’ll save it for Saturday.”
“Much better. Besides, I have to drive Caroline home now. If that’s okay.”
Mrs. Lee glances at me. “Caroline, you live pretty close, right?”
“Just ten minutes or so.”
“Then that’s no problem. Thanks for coming over, Caroline. Georgia spends so much time at your house, it’s nice to meet you.” She motions Georgia over to her, and Georgia gives her a perfunctory hug. “Drive safe. I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom,” Georgia says. “Be back soon.” She catches my eye and cocks her head toward the doorway sharply.
“Bye, Mrs. Lee, it was nice to meet you,” I say as we leave the kitchen.
“You too,” I hear her call, as if from far away.
We’re both silent as we walk out the door, our footsteps echoing in the tall foyer. The silence continues as we get into her car and pull out of her driveway. I gaze out the window, sneaking glances at Georgia as often as I can. She looks
tired.
When she switches on the turn signal to leave her neighborhood, she finally speaks up.
“So now you get why we never go to my house.”
“It really was not bad,” I say. “Your mom seems nice. And your house is an actual art museum. I felt like I was among the old masters.”
“It’s just,” she starts, ignoring my joke, and then stops for a moment. Her headlights trace a steady path down the dark road. “I know the house is nice. I know I’m really lucky. I really truly do know that. But my parents are just so…much. They expect too much. They have all these rules, and they expect me to break them for them, but not for myself. They can be so mean. About whatever. School. Messiness. Food, like tonight.”
“She didn’t seem mad,” I ventured. “Just annoyed. About the food.”
“Oh, trust me, she’s mad,” Georgia says. “We fight about it all the time. My dad is even worse about it, actually, because he used to run track in college and he’s always been thin. The only other fat person in my family is my mom’s mom in Washington, and she lives in a nursing home, and my parents think she’s sick because she’s fat. Which isn’t true, but whatever, that’s not the point. So, when you started inviting me to your house in the afternoons… I mean, your parents are so nice. They’re happy all the time, and they care about you.”
“Your parents care about you too,” I say tentatively. “I mean, your mom’s not…the warmest person, necessarily, but she clearly loves you.”
“But your mom,” she starts again, “I know it pisses you off when she talks about college, but…she would probably be happy with anything. Not to say,” she follows up quickly, “that you couldn’t get into an Ivy League. But my parents are so intense about it. I mean, I had to beg for them to let me work this job this year. Last year, I spent half my summer at this gifted-and-talented camp and the other half volunteering at the library. It was fine, but I felt like I was in school all summer. This summer, I just wanted a normal job. Especially since I have to do all the SAT practice tests.”
The Goodbye Summer Page 6
