Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  I realized my mother was looking at me pointedly.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “What are you going to get?”

  “Oh, um—” I looked at the menu and said the first thing my eyes set on. “The fruit salad, I think.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m not that hungry.”

  “I think you should get the omelet. I don’t want you to get too thin.”

  “I’m not too thin.”

  “It doesn’t look good, you know, to be that thin. I know. I was really thin when I was younger—everyone was always telling me how thin I was and yet I was always trying to lose weight. You’re the perfect weight right now. What are you,? One-twenty? That’s what I used to weigh.”

  “Somewhere around there.” I was 117.

  “Don’t try to lose any more.”

  “I’m not, Mom.”

  “I just want you to be healthy.”

  When the waiter finally arrived, I ordered the omelet with home fries just to get her to shut up. My mother got the fruit salad. “I need to watch my weight,” she said, though she spent most of the meal spearing various bits from my plate and ferrying them to her mouth quickly as if I wouldn’t notice. Eventually, talk turned to my father, as I knew it inevitably would.

  “You should call him,” my mother said. I was busy mashing the remaining potatoes with my fork and didn’t answer. She went on: “We’ve filed another appeal. Saul has a good feeling about this one.”

  I put my fork down. “Why keep trying? Everyone knows he did it.”

  “Don’t say that!” she shout-whispered, looking over her shoulder.

  I rolled my eyes. “No one’s listening.”

  “You don’t know that.” She clasped her collar together against her throat. In a whisper she continued: “People are looking for any excuse…You saw what happened. Making a big deal out of everything.”

  “A big deal? He defrauded people of hundreds of thousands of dollars! Families lost their homes! Kids can’t go to college!”

  She waved that away—the fact of his conviction, his crimes—as if it were all a misunderstanding. “It was an accounting strategy,” she said. “He was always going to pay it back, he just needed to move the money around first. It would have been in everybody’s best interest, if they’d just let him continue—”

  “Mom! Let him continue? He was stealing.”

  She sighed. “It’s not so cut and dry, Mick. These things are complicated.”

  “Jesus, Mom, when will you stop believing his lies?”

  “He’s your father, Michaela.”

  “I know. I have no choice in the matter. You do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should divorce him!” I hadn’t meant to yell it.

  She looked stricken.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, honey.” She covered my hand with hers. She still wore her wedding ring: an obese diamond, haloed by chubby children and set on a thick platinum band. If I looked closely, I could see the outline of tender pale white skin underneath the band. The rest of her hands looked like those of someone much older than the rest of her: blue veins crisscrossed them like highways, and age spots had appeared as constellations sometime over the past few years. Her knuckles, too, had swollen. It occurred to me that perhaps she wasn’t able to slide the ring off anymore. She said: “I couldn’t do that to him.”

  I stared at her. I still remembered the time he gave her a black eye so big she had to get new sunglasses the size of flying saucers (Chanel). I still remembered when, shortly after his mother died of a sudden stroke, he’d absconded for a week away in the Caribbean for “some alone time to recover.” Only we found out later he’d gone to Atlantic City instead, returning bleary eyed, ten grand poorer, and with a case of crabs. I knew all these things and more. I was like a spy in my own house. My favorite place to sit when I was little was a window seat tucked into the corner of our living room. And though it was comfortable and had a view of the garden, what I really liked was that when I sat in it, I felt like I disappeared into the walls of the room. It wasn’t just my imagination. Because of the large drapes on either side, it was easy to miss the small person curled up with her knees tucked up to her chin, sucking on a piece of her hair, staring dreamily out the window. My parents often did.

  I don’t remember the first fight I saw—the violence and anger between them was always there, had always been there to my knowledge, so that it took on the constant hum of white noise—but I am pretty sure it happened in that room. Anyway, many more were to come. At first, I sat motionless out of shame; I didn’t want them to see me because for some reason I felt embarrassed, as if what they were doing wasn’t wrong until I witnessed it. But then I stayed because I wanted to know; I wanted to know what the fights were about, what made my father spit things from his mouth I had thought unimaginable, what made his hand shoot out like a whip and slap my mother across the face, what made my mother collapse into herself, lips trembling. I don’t know why they thought it okay to fight in front of me like that—for surely, they saw me eventually. I guess they thought I wouldn’t understand. But I did. I made a point to. I saw the violence that roiled my father and mistook it for power. “He’s who you inherited your rage from, isn’t he?” the court-appointed therapist asks me now. Yes, it’s true, I learned the language of violence from him. But back then, I never had an outlet for it. Learning, knowing, that was the only power I had. Still, I somehow managed to miss the nature of my father’s dealings, a crucial element of our lives, the genesis of our wealth. Friends used to ask, But didn’t you know? Didn’t you guess? I honestly didn’t. That’s the thing about money. It insulates you from certain truths. If ignorance is bliss, then it’s also the greatest luxury money can buy.

  The week after my father got arrested, I went back to that window seat. Our house was surrounded by a thick stone wall, and behind it was a semicircular lawn my mother had just that summer planted with roses: showy pink, white, and red blooms. There had been a big oak tree in the corner of the lawn that I’d played on as a child, but it’d died the year before—we never figured out why—and my mother had used its removal as an excuse to get the whole lawn redone. Hence the roses. If you looked closely, you could see a large circle of grass just a shade brighter and more uneven where the oak had been ripped out. It reminded me of a poorly concealed zit. Beyond the wall, and through the gate, I could see the crowds of photographers, reporters, protestors with their signs. Watching from my half-concealed perch at the window, I was transfixed. It all seemed to have nothing to do with me. I had to remind myself: this house, that oak tree, those roses, even my mother’s dirtied bathrobe, all of it had been bought and paid for with those people’s money, and now that money was gone. Poof. I may not have personally done anything wrong, but my entire life, my very existence, had been built on the backs of others’ sufferings. And that made me complicit. It is immoral to be rich; if being rich means having more money than you need, more money than you know what to do with, who do you think is paying that price? The epiphany hung around until I was broke. Yes, it’s immoral to be rich, but it’s worse being poor.

  I put my hand on top of my mother’s and we held each other there for a few moments, each lost in our own galaxy of thought, until she, looking down, said, “I like that nail polish. Is it Essie?”

  “OPI.” It was pale gray, and called Take No Prisoners.

  On the way to the PATH station, we stopped to buy magazines. My mother must have been boiling in that silly coat, though she showed no signs of it.

  “Oh look, they have all the foreign ones!” she said, beelining for a wall on which dozens of frozen smiles gleamed from brightly lit covers. I picked up one of the fat avant-garde titles and leafed through it, settling on a long profile of a famous female artist, in which she herself was not pictured but a teenage model pos
ed, as if in mid-brushstroke, in front of her abstract canvases. My mother peeked over my shoulder. She had a stack of magazines cradled in her arm and wordlessly fanned them out so I could see her selection.

  “These get me so excited!” she said giddily. Her eyes fell on a magazine with Gemma on the cover, staring icily at the camera. Then she looked at me adoringly: “You know, you’re so beautiful. I knew you were going to be a model, even when you were little. Everyone was always telling me how beautiful you were.”

  “We should go.” I made a show of checking the time. “You’ll miss the 2:16.”

  Outside, my mother tucked her arm into mine. I could hear the rhythmic thwap as the plastic bag full of magazines hit her calf. The streets were crowded and the air was thick with the caramelized-sugar smell of roasted nuts, and strangers’ sweat. I thought everyone looked particularly gross and ugly. A homeless woman sat cross-legged on a blanket, next to a flea-bitten dog, and looked at us plaintively. My mother fished through her wallet and gave her a carefully folded one-dollar bill.

  “Can’t you just see yourself on the cover of one of those one day?” my mother asked me suddenly, continuing a conversation she must have been having in her head.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, I totally can. You should send your picture to Vogue.”

  “That’s not how it works, Mom.”

  “The important thing is to just be seen.”

  “There are castings you go to. My agent sets them up.”

  “People like eagerness. That you take the initiative.”

  “Mom. Stop.”

  “I just want you to have a career. I gave up mine when I married your father, which of course I don’t regret at all, because I had you—” She cupped my cheek briefly in her palm. “But, still.”

  “I know.”

  “Any exciting gigs coming up?”

  “It’s pretty slow in the summer.”

  We came to a stop outside the PATH station. My mother squeezed my hand. “Well,” she said. “There’s a second bedroom at Joey’s—we just have to move the exercise bike and clean out the closet. It’s mostly dog toys in there anyway.”

  I looked up at her sharply but she wouldn’t meet my eye. “I thought the deal was, you guys could keep helping me out for the next six months, possibly a year.” I measured the words carefully.

  “I know, sweetheart, but that was when we were winning the last appeal.”

  “And now?”

  She sighed. “Saul is the very best, the very best, everyone says—”

  I cut her off. “So?”

  “Well, he’s not cheap.” She touched the ends of her hair again with her fingertips and added, almost to herself, “You get what you pay for.”

  “Mom, this appeal bullshit has to stop.”

  “I can’t,” she said. Her cheeks were red, and her eyes watery. “It’s the only way we can ever…” She faltered.

  “Ever what?”

  She rifled through her purse and took out a tube of ChapStick, running it over her lips in a manner so familiar to me that it instantly took me back to childhood: one rough glide, sealed with two silent smacks. “Things will go back to normal,” she said finally. “After this appeal. In the meantime, don’t worry about it, lovey. Joey’s isn’t so bad, and Newark is just a train ride away. We’ll figure something out.”

  I watched her descend the stairs into the PATH; with each step, a feeling of dread tightened further around my neck like a noose. Since my father had gone to jail last year, I’d only visited him twice, and both times were awful. I knew my mother saw him every weekend and that it was only a matter of time until she made me go, too. If I lived with her, there would be no escape. I couldn’t breathe. A woman sighed loudly and made a show of stepping around me. Fuck her, I thought, and stamped my foot as I turned to start the walk home along Fourteenth Street. A couple of tween girls gave me an odd look, and giggled conspiratorially. Fuck them, too. My stomach seemed to have expanded with the weight of breakfast, what my mother made me eat, and that fullness began to feel like the dread itself: heavy and nauseating and inevitable. For a moment, I was terrified I would throw up—and that was like the dread, too, because, as much as you feared it, you knew what was going to happen, and a part of you wanted it to happen, too, just so you could get it over with. Instead, I stopped at a halal truck to buy a bottle of water. I chugged it while speed-walking until it was gone, then chucked it without breaking stride onto a convenient mountain of trash. I could tell I was shaking, and that my eyes were not focusing properly—they kept darting around unbidden—but I pretended not to notice. I imagined, for the benefit of those passersby who occasionally glanced my way, that I was in a rush to meet my boyfriend, and that he was very worried about me, because I’d recently been hospitalized with a mysterious illness that kept me bedridden and emaciated. My phone had died, and now he was sick with worry because he had not heard from me. He was worried the illness had taken me again. I had to get to him. A bike messenger whizzed by me just as I was stepping off the curb, lifting my hair briefly from my shoulders. I didn’t even pause; I angled my body so I could glide among the sweaty throng, but I had lost hold of the boyfriend fantasy and the dread returned, swiftly cycling through to anger, fear, despair, and back again.

  $13,827. The number flashed in my head like a neon sign. It was how much I owed my agency. They’d loaned me money to live off while I “found my feet” in the city, and I was too stupid and naive to ask if there’d be interest. Jason had been texting me these past few weeks, too, asking me to find a time so that we could have a coffee and chat. I had been putting it off, knowing what he was going to say, the way he would squeeze my thigh in that overly familiar way of his and say, Sugarplum, you know I love you, but…My vision blurred, and I was struck with sudden vertigo. When I steadied myself, there was an intense aura of familiarity. I had returned to the spot where the woman was sitting, cross-legged, with her dog on a dirtied fleece blanket. She was exactly as she had been before—except now there was a lanky blond woman crouching before her. My ears buzzed as a profound feeling of confusion rankled me and then quickly diffused like a puff of black smoke.

  It was Gemma. She was wearing the Outdoor Voices Classic Two-Tone Leggings in Black/Blue, an Entireworld Organic Cotton Tank in Navy, and—I squinted—Gucci Birkenstocks, and her hair bounced as she stood, then formed a curtain in front of her face as she dipped it towards the woman. The woman beamed up at her, thanking her. Gemma laughed lightly as they said goodbye—and then she was off down Fourteenth Street, a Whole Foods tote bag swinging at her shoulder. The woman began to pick at the saran wrap of a premade sandwich. I watched, frozen, as Gemma rounded the corner, turning down Broadway and out of view.

  I took off at a run.

  * * *

  —

  I hadn’t intended, at first, to actually talk to her. Truly. I only wanted to see her. To observe her at close range. But by the time I’d followed her a few blocks down Broadway and into the Strand bookstore, a plan had taken shape in my mind. I would bump into her casually and, naturally enough, squint my eyes in recognition. Were you at La Boîte last night…? Or, Ah, what’s this, another mirage? Then we could get to talking. I watched her as she browsed the books on display at the New & Noteworthy Fiction table, hefting them in her long, thin hands as if weighing them and then putting them softly back down again, her sensitive eyes processing each of the brightly designed covers. She seemed in a pensive, almost sad, mood, and for a moment, I faltered. Perhaps she didn’t want to be bothered. Then again, I was allowed to be there just as much as she was, and if we happened to run into each other, well, it was nobody’s fault. Besides, I reminded myself, she had messaged me. While I was thinking this, though, she looked up and, catching on something just behind me, abruptly put down the book she was holding and walked off, disappearing between the bookshelves.

  I
t took me a moment to find her in the labyrinthine grid of stacks. When I did, she was tucked up at the end of an aisle, an open book cradled in her hand. Her back was to me, her head dipped forward studiously. She’d tied her hair back into a messy bun. Something I did when I wanted to concentrate. Seeing her there, with her hair up, back and neck exposed, the daubs of light dancing off the knobs of her spine, I felt nauseous again. My palms were wet, and I realized I’d forgotten to put on deodorant that morning. My own rank animal smell prickled the insides of my nostrils. But I had come too far. I was almost beside her…I pretended to study the names along the shelf she was facing…I would crouch slightly, as if trying to get a better angle at the titles she was blocking, mutter excuse me, our eyes would meet, and then—

  “Babe?”

  Both of us turned and I, already unsteady on my feet, wobbled and almost fell into our interloper.

  “Whoa.” Benoit steadied my shoulders, then looked from me to Gemma. He was dressed in all black, and wearing tinted aviator frames and a baseball cap. I muttered an apology, blushing, and though it would have been natural for me to turn away, go about my business, I didn’t move.

  Gemma laughed but she looked annoyed. “I was looking for you.”

  “And now I’m here.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Baby, you know I don’t control time.” He leaned in and kissed her gently on the cheek and she visibly softened. “Are you…?” He drew an invisible line between Gemma and me with his finger. Gemma turned to look at me, seemingly for the first time.