“Fashion model,” I say very quietly, careful that no one will overhear, that no one will ask for verification.
Before Becky has a chance to respond, the principal pipes in over the loudspeaker, telling us that school’s dismissed, effective immediately.
Mr. Ditman shouts over us as we gather our books and hustle toward the door. “Careful out there!” He has that pensive look he always has when he stares out the window. “Mid-April snowstorm,” he says, shaking his head.
Ditman is saying something about seat belts and zipping up our jackets when we all squish three abreast through the doorway and into the hall. I grab my backpack and make a beeline for the door as images of home start percolating. A blazing fireplace. The warm comforter on my bed. The smell of bacon and coffee. Mom and Dad working in the kitchen behind stacks of books. A gust of wind sends a chill down my spine once I’m outside. “Knitting machine fixer” is not one of those career choices that would allow a parent to be let down softly. There’s no leading up to it, no letting them do the math before you blurt out the answer. Shock and awe. That’s what this would be. Without the awe factor. I picture that glimmer in their eyes of heightened understanding fade to black with the three words, K.M.F. And I know that in the backs of their minds, even though they won’t want it to enter their consciousness, even though they’ll fight it off with every kind of mental weapon they have, they will wonder about Maya. How would Maya have fared? If these test results have proven anything, it’s that no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be as smart as Maya. My parents, with their “You can be whoever you want to be” nonsense, are wrong. Nature trumps hard work every time.
I get to the bottom of Rose Avenue and turn into our neighborhood. I must have sped out of school because none of the neighborhood kids are around to walk with me. Apart from the occasional muffled wheels of a car creeping down the street, all I hear is wind. Heavy snow coats the tree branches and new leaves like icing. The wind whips through my thick tights and squirrels its way down my zipped-up jacket and under my thin blouse to my bare skin. I pick up speed despite the slush and my flats, breaking through the thick, smoky patches of my own breath as I walk. A sharp crackle in the wetlands bordering Greenwood Lane stops me in the middle of the road. Through a curtain of snowflakes, I spot a doe and search for a diamond on her chest, the sign that she’s the one that gave birth to twin fawns last week. She comes to a halt when she sees me, and that’s when I see her markings clearly. I scan the wetlands for her two babies but see only one stumbling over fallen branches and vines with its spindly legs. It bobbles to its mother’s side before students’ voices coming from behind me send them both deeper into the marsh, out of view.
And that’s when I see Dad’s old Volvo slowly skid around the corner.
“Get in!” Dad is in the same T-shirt he wore as a pajama top the night before.
“You’re not dressed yet?” I try to act surprised, but I’m not.
“How about I go change, and I’ll be back for you later,” he says as I climb in. “And just for the record, I haven’t brushed my teeth either.”
“Ever heard of TMI?”
“Huh?”
“Too much information?”
“Of course, I know that,” he lies. “But how about giving your old man a break? It’s not even nine in the morning, for god’s sake.”
I roll my eyes, and he’s instantly testy because he knows that I know that he lied about the TMI thing.
“Thanks a lot, Dad,” I say, feeling a little guilty. “I love you.” And I mean it. I don’t see any other cars following ours to pick up their kids. Mom and Dad are superstars for this kind of thing.
Our small stone house looks like a cottage from a made-for-Christmas movie. The roof is already white with snow, and because Dad’s got a fire going in the fireplace, there is an orange-yellow glow emanating from the downstairs windows. He parks the car in the garage, and we trudge through the snow to the house. Whoever thought a detached garage was a good idea never spent a winter in the Northeast. The hallway leading from the mudroom to the kitchen is humid with the bittersweet aroma of coffee and cookies.
“Care for a sugar cookie, sweetie?” Mom doesn’t turn around as I wriggle onto the stool at the counter. She’s busy baking, which is what she does when she’s got writer’s block.
“No thanks,” I say. I want to tell her that I don’t like sugar cookies. That they’re way too sweet. That Maya was the one. But I try not to bring up Maya if I can help it. Especially this early in the morning. Especially when Mom’s already dealing with writer’s block.
“Well, maybe just one,” I say.
She slides the spatula under a cookie and hands it to me with a cloth napkin and a kiss on the forehead. I shove it in whole as if it were an aspirin and swallow it down with a swig of my mom’s coffee. And with that swig, I am reminded that there are things far worse than sugar cookies. Like coffee. I head to the sink and drink directly from the faucet while Mom places a second cookie on my napkin.
“Look at you, you hungry thing.” She plops down on the stool next to mine.
I roll random sprinkles from one side of my napkin to the other and can’t help but notice that she’s staring at me, observing me, the way Becky does. When I raise the cookie to my lips sandwich-style and take a deep breath to prepare for another bite, Maya and her “I love you, Peg” flash before my eyes. The sugary-sweet smell on her breath that day had been sugar cookies. I nibble at the edge of the cookie before Mom lowers my hands to the napkin.
“You don’t like sugar cookies, do you.”
* * *
The most amazing thing happens when someone you love is born. Time changes. Suddenly 3:45 in the afternoon is no longer just 3:45. It’s exactly two days and one hour since so-and-so came into your life. It’s no longer May 15, but three months exactly since you became a big sister. The first week, you’re gauging time by the hour, the first month by the day, the first year by the month. You celebrate at least twenty birthdays that first year, like you’re making up either for lost time or for the birthdays you won’t be around for when the special so-and-so in question is old and you’re dead or close to it. It’s only after this person you love turns one that you can start celebrating yearly like most normal people. The way you remember things, however, is changed forever. For the rest of your life, instead of thinking, The party was April 3, you will think, The party was the day Maya tried ice cream for the first time. I don’t remember the date of my first kiss (Shawn Filipi on the walk home from school), but I do remember it was the same day that Maya slipped down the stairs and cracked her front baby tooth.
That was Maya. Accident-prone. I mean, who sprains a wrist in the swimming pool? Or scratches a cornea playing house? Maya was Einstein-bright but could never figure out how to pump on the swings or skip without thinking about it. I, on the other hand, lived for swaying from the thick and knotty wetland vines and filling Mom’s Tupperware with ants, tadpoles, or little garden snakes. I had a permanent layer of dirt under a dangerously jagged set of fingernails. My jeans, the uniform du jour, were riddled with snags and holes and frayed bottoms. My parents, who probably would turn to dust if exposed to too much fresh air and sunlight, counted on me to teach Maya about nature and normal-kid fun, so they overlooked the mud and ragged clothing.
Maya was five when I taught her to bike. I can picture her now in that long, frilly dress that I had tucked into the waist of her tights, her hair blowing behind like streamers as she gained speed. Despite the panting and her tired, pudgy legs, and the pedals that nicked the backs of her white tights every time her Mary Janes lost their footing, and the deafening sound of training wheels scraping along the pavement, she kept going, up and down the driveway. Up and down. I remember clapping so hard and long that my hands stung. I screamed until I was hoarse. Mom and Dad used to put on old classics like Old Yeller and Born Free, the kind of movies where ani
mals either get lost in the wild or die, and I never shed a tear. But as I watched Maya biking, with her dress bulging under her tights and her little bell with its cash-register ring, I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks.
As soon as I was in her line of sight, she locked eyes with me, paying no attention to the stray branches on the driveway. She bumped over them, unfazed, her gaze never leaving mine. I could’ve screamed at her to keep her eyes on the road and not on me, to watch where she was going. But to break her gaze would have been self-sabotage, because through Maya’s eyes I was perfect. In her eyes, I was something special. That day on her bike as she stared at me in amazement, with her raised eyebrows and dropped jaw, I was reminded of my superhero side, a side that by fifth grade was already fading. Now that I’m sixteen, I’m figuring that piece of me is altogether lost or dead, kind of like the animals in those old movies my parents used to make me watch. And just like when I was younger, I’m not going to cry that this side of me is gone forever, even though the thought makes me desperately sad.
When Maya finally skidded to a stop next to me, her knuckles were white from squeezing the handlebars. She pushed my plastic frames up the ridge of her nose with her thumb and then felt for the minuscule Wonder Woman crest superglued near the hinge. Mom had replaced the lenses of her old childhood frames and passed them on to me when I was about Maya’s age. Mom had said they would give me superhero strength, and this is what I told Maya.
“I’m Superwoman!”
“Wonder Woman,” I said wrapping my arms around her little waist. “You’re Wonder Woman.”
She exhaled warmth into my neck as she hugged me. I remember her breath was sweet. Like marshmallows. Or was it white chocolate? And that’s when she grabbed my face with her sticky hands and said with more feeling than I’ve probably said anything in my entire life, “I love you, Peg!”
When you love someone and lose them, even the strongest, happiest memories you have of that person self-detonate and leave you choking in a smoky haze of regret. If I’d had more time, I would’ve shown Maya how to swing from the dewy vines in the woods beyond our yard. How to shoot over the rocks and leaves and broken branches in the woods, how to track deer and wild turkeys. I wouldn’t have listened to my parents’ droning about hypothermia or rain or mosquitos or ticks or the fact that Maya was only three, or four, or five. If I’d known the future, I would’ve had her knot a cord around a slimy chicken neck and throw it into Lake West to catch crabs. We would’ve snuck out for a campout in the backyard and stretched out in the grass beneath the stars and the splotchy silhouette of leaves blowing overhead. I would’ve cuddled her in my arms and never let go.
A week after Maya learned to ride her bike, Mom and Dad dusted off theirs and told us we were going on a family excursion. “Not far,” they warned multiple times, as if I would’ve expected anything else from our pizza-dough parents.
Dad pedaled to the end of the driveway and waited for us. “Come on, team! Let’s go!” He clapped at us like a football coach on the sidelines, and I couldn’t help but thank God that the Watsons next door weren’t out gardening. As he clapped, his front wheel spun perpendicular and began to roll. The more it rolled, the more Dad’s clapping became irregular until finally he lunged for the handlebars and spread his legs wide for maximum balance. And that’s when I noticed a disgusting hole in the crotch of his bike shorts. Bike shorts that would put his circulatory system in danger, if he weren’t careful. Bike shorts that I’d make sure found their way into the garbage can that night.
“What’s wrong with you, Peg?”
“Nothing,” I lied, trying to uncinch the sneer from my face.
“Well, I’m going, even if this bike is a piece of junk.” He wobbled onto Greenwood without checking for traffic as if he owned the road, as if he knew exactly what he were doing.
At least Mom didn’t hide the fact that she was uncomfortable. By the time she reached the edge of the driveway, her helmet was slipping down her left cheek. As I watched her struggle blindly with the clasp (the helmet still on her head), I noticed a cobweb between the chin strap and the hard hat. When she finally swatted it away, the web and its dried-up spider stuck to her fingers and she squealed.
“Catch up with Daddy, girls,” Mom huffed. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
If Maya hadn’t been so excited about this bike trip, I would’ve booked it inside and watched some sorry excuse for Saturday-afternoon television. Riding past my classmates’ homes with Mom and her crooked helmet and Dad in his skin-tight biking shorts with a crotch hole had the potential for irreparable social damage.
Maya and I inched our way onto Greenwood, and I braced myself for the potential beginning of the end. But Dad was surprisingly nowhere in sight. I glanced back at Mom, who was still busy with her helmet, and decided to take things into my own hands.
“Come on, Maya,” I said, waving her onto Lake Road, which was more a gravel path than a road.
“What about Daddy?”
“He’ll find us.” Although I hoped that he wouldn’t.
The road was uneven, and Maya’s training wheels only half-touched the ground. We continued around the curve until we could see Lake West below. Maya rolled to a stop next to me.
“Is this a Peg-and-Maya adventure?” Maya unzipped the wallet-size bag hooked on her handlebars and pulled out some broken chips and half-cookies. She shoved a cookie in her mouth as if she were starving.
I pulled some dirty string from my bike basket and fished out a couple of rocks. “Let’s go fishing.”
Lake Road leads you past an abandoned cottage to the broken dock that juts into Lake West. We left our bikes leaning against a tree and stepped over the splintered planks and rusty nails and fish bones. Maya held on to me until we were both seated at the end of the dock.
“Mom and Dad are thoroughly embarrassing. Mom’s helmet was covered with cobwebs,” I said, handing Maya her line.
“I cleaned the top of it with my hand,” Maya said.
“And Dad’s shame-o-meter has hit an all-time high with those shorts.”
“But real bikers wear that kind.”
“Cyclists, not bikers,” I said. I threw her line into the murky, still water while she held on to the other end where I’d made a loop for her wrist. There was always a thick, salty fog along Lake West. I felt alone here in its comforting density. Alone to think. But today, perhaps due to the crotch hole or the dried-up spider, the fog was giving me a chill.
“Why are Mommy and Daddy embarrassing?”
“They look ridiculous in their helmets and sports shorts,” I said. “It’s just not them.”
Maya frowned. “Am I embarrassing?”
“No!” I frowned.
“I’m wearing a helmet and I’m wearing a sporty shirt.” She paused. “You have on shorts and a helmet too, Peg. Are you embarrassed of yourself?” Maya’s question wasn’t a question at all but a deduction that, to her, was so insane that she had to end it as a question.
“First of all, Maya, you’re five, so everything you do is cute. You’ve got on your frilly skirt and your Mary Janes and one, two, three barrettes in your hair, and about ten bracelets on. You’re not trying to be something you’re not; you’re just being you,” I said.
“But, I’m Wonder Woman too. Remember?”
I hadn’t noticed my Wonder Woman frames perched on her nose until she reached up to take them off.
“What about their magic powers?” I asked. “Why are you taking them off?”
“I want to be just Maya,” she said. “I don’t want to be someone I’m not. Not even Wonder Woman.”
“I’ll never ever be embarrassed by you.” I cradled her chin in my hands and peered deep into her tepid gaze. “Sisters are like BFFs, Maya. Except better.”
“You should be proud of Mommy and Daddy like you’re proud of me.” For the first
time, I looked into her eyes and felt less than perfect.
I wanted to explain to her that I had a reputation, however piddly, to uphold and that Mom and Dad, with their crotch holes and spider-infested helmets, could crumble it all in seconds. What Maya couldn’t understand at five, despite her genius brain, was that a label can stick with you for life.
“You’re right,” I said, panicked. Our Maya-and-me adventure had lasted a total of thirty seconds.
We rode back to Greenwood in silence and saw Dad up ahead. Despite Maya’s words and my decision to be proud of my parents, I braced myself for the hole.
“Ran into one of your friends,” Dad huffed from several houses away. “Boy named Darren,” he huffed again. “Nice boy.”
“What did you tell him, Dad?”
“Said he knew you. Said he plays soccer.”
Dad continued to talk, but I wasn’t processing concepts, just names.
“And some girl named Karen. She says she knows you too,” Dad panted. “You’re a popular girl, sweetie!”
“Not anymore,” I mumbled. And that’s when I noticed that the hole had grown to the size of a tennis ball since Dad had left the driveway. “Did you even notice the gaping hole in your pants?”
He looked down, then back up. “That explains a lot.”
“Were people running for cover? Mothers covering their children’s eyes?”
“I’m not overheated, is all,” he said with a condescending chuckle.
“Repulsive!” I shoved across Greenwood and Maya followed. Dad sped past Maya to catch up with me for a talking-to. I rode toward Mom, who was sitting in the driveway next to her bike.
“My helmet’s broken. Not worth a damn, this thing,” she called to us.
Dad and I sped through the empty four-way stop two doors from our house.
“There was another little girl with her old man,” Dad taunted. “Liza Something-or-other.”
“She’s our class president,” I said, my nostrils flared and fuming. “Next time, don’t talk to my friends.” I sailed past him to the driveway, whizzing by Mom as if she weren’t there.
Hold-Up Page 5
