Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  “Uh-huh. So what do you want?” I asked, pushing the menu at her.

  “Oh, I’ll just have whatever you’re having. Did you have breakfast today?”

  I nodded.

  “What’d you have?”

  “Eggs.”

  Whenever I lost weight my mom kept meticulous track of everything I ate and tried her best to copy it.

  “What kind of eggs?”

  “I don’t know, scrambled? Why don’t you save our seats there,” I said, pointing to a table next to the window. “I’ll order.”

  My mom passed me her credit card. At the counter, I took a deep breath, trying to soothe my irritation. Almost immediately, I felt a surge of guilt—my mother meant well, I didn’t get to see her all that often, I should learn to appreciate my time with her. But my self-recrimination over my irritation with her only increased the irritation I felt towards her.

  The woman behind the counter was white, had a nose ring, and wore a shirt that said End Racism on it. “Did you want a boost for your soups?” she asked me.

  “What was that?”

  “A boost. You can have a love boost, a passion boost…brain boost, empathy boost…” She articulated each boost with a dip of her head.

  “Uh-huh, what’s in them?”

  “It’s a proprietary blend of ingredients.”

  When I didn’t answer but just stood there in consternation, she went on, “Personally, the love boost’s my favorite.”

  “How much is it to add?”

  “Six dollars.”

  I laughed. Six dollars for a splash of salt, probably. “We’re fine, thanks.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yeah, we’ve all the love we need.”

  She handed me a number and I sat back down with my mother, who had her reading glasses on and was painstakingly typing something on her phone with her index finger.

  “Sorry, one sec,” she said.

  “It’s fine.”

  Apparently finished, she flipped her phone so it was face down and then threw her reading glasses back in her purse, a large black hobo bag I hadn’t seen before.

  “That new?” I asked.

  She picked up the bag, a sheepish smile on her face, and put it on her lap, stroking it gently as one would a cat. “A celebratory purchase.”

  It was then I noticed the gold lettering on the front. Celine. And from the looks of it, real, too. Celebratory? I thought. For what? And then I realized that she must have been thinking of the JOY shoot this weekend, and my obviously imminent rise to fame. It was just like my mother to get ahead of herself like that. She was like a child in that way, I thought, though not unkindly. I laughed.

  “Mom, you should’ve waited.”

  She pursed her lips together and raised her eyebrows excitedly. “There’s no need to wait,” she said, barely containing herself. “It’s already official, honey! We won! He’s out! It’s all over!”

  I stared at her, mouth agape, as I tried to process what she was saying.

  “I know, I know, it happened yesterday, and I was going to call you, but then I thought, I’ll tell her in person.” She was beaming at me; her whole face was a bubble of joy. I felt the sand give way beneath me, the tide taking me out, icy waters rising to my throat.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, my voice catching on an awkward laugh. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Well, his appeal started yesterday, as you know,” she began, though I had of course forgotten all about it, or perhaps blocked it from my mind. “And we were expecting it to take a few weeks, but the judge overturned it on the spot! We couldn’t believe it, we were so happy.” She shook her head wonderingly, still stroking the leather on her handbag.

  “What do you mean, he just overturned it?”

  “Something about jury misconduct,” my mother said, narrowing her eyes in concentration. “I think, anyways? I don’t know how Saul pulled it off.”

  “Just overturned it in one day?” I asked again, my body cold and my heart beating fast from treading water in the icy depths, trying to keep my head from going under. “I mean, doesn’t that seem kind of…weird?” I had wanted to say shady. I had wanted to say corrupt.

  My mother shrugged, a delighted look on her face. “Who knows? The point is he’s out. He’s home.”

  “Home?” I swallowed. We had sold our home to pay for the trial.

  “Well, the Four Seasons for now.”

  I glared at her, unable to speak.

  “I know it’s expensive, but give the guy a break, he’s been in jail for two years, and anyway it’s just for a few days, while we celebrate. Then it’s back to Joey’s. Of course, that’ll only be temporary, too. He’s already gotten back in touch with some of his old partners, and now with all this behind him, we can go back to normal, and I know we can get back to what we were, it’ll take time but then your father is persistent, isn’t he? I told him he should think about taking some time off—Saul said best to keep a low profile. The prosecutors are already working on a new filing, there’ll likely be a retrial—though I can’t imagine they’ll reconvict, I mean”—she laughed a little—“you’d think they’d have learned their lesson by now, right? The whole thing just seems so silly to me. So…unsportsmanlike, don’t you think? If you lose, you lose, that should be it.”

  I neglected to point out that my father had lost his first trial and that hadn’t stopped him from appealing. I was too preoccupied with a question that had just occurred to me, completely urgent in nature. “So, wait…he’s in the city?” I blurted out.

  “Yeah, at the Four Seasons,” she said, making it clear that this should have been obvious. “He almost came down for this, just to give you a real surprise, but then, you know how he is.” She rolled her eyes. “Taxis make him nauseous, he can’t walk, the traffic, the crowds…” She laughed. “Anyway, we thought it would be more special to do it tonight, something fancy, you know. We thought—”

  My phone vibrated with a new text message, and I practically fell over myself retrieving it from my purse, which was slung over the back of my chair. My mother continued to prattle on about the night, while with shaky hands I caressed the cold metal surface of my phone, which I held hidden beneath the table in my lap. Julia wanted to know if she should get bangs. She sent three selfies with hair positioned over her forehead.

  Do it, Blake responded. Also, srsly, I’m now considering a buzz cut am I crazy?

  She sent a screenshot from Karma Black’s Instagram; in it, she stared out vacantly in front of a dilapidated wall with large strips of paint torn from it. She was undeniably beautiful and she had a raw, unvarnished quality, as if she really didn’t care what she looked like. In other words: nothing like Blake.

  Lol, I think that only works on Karma because she’s like a badass, biracial renegade, no offense, wrote Julia.

  I’m just so bored with my LEWK, I wanna dooooo something, y’know?

  I hear you so hard girl.

  I sought further distraction on Instagram, droning out my mother’s excited speech with Likes, and Views, colorful squares of other people’s lives, wishing more than ever that I could see Gemma. Even though I had promised myself I wouldn’t think of her, wouldn’t even care if she did come back online, I still sought her face—that familiar visage that instantly calmed me—in my feed, like an amputee continues to feel that phantom limb. But it was just the usual bullshit. My old best friend from high school had gotten engaged, and the ring was ginormous and very ugly. A man was holding up a cardboard sign as if in protest, only it read Why does it feel like Mercury is always in Retrograde? Corey Wang, an A-tier blogger, had gotten a new puppy. A sponsored post for a leopard bra asked if I was feeling down. We’ll support you, always, no matter what the mood. We got your back, girl. And you got THIS. (Whether this is just getting groceries or going on a date, and general #adulting.) A baby was caught saying good nig
ht to its cat on the nanny cam.

  “Two Original Badass Bone Broths,” the waitress said, and I tore my eyes away from my phone to see two steaming bone broths set down in front of us.

  “Oh wow, these look lovely,” my mother said, evidently unaware that for the past several minutes I hadn’t been listening to her. I felt a twinge of pain in my jaw and realized I’d been grinding my teeth.

  “Are you two mother–daughter?” the waitress asked cheerfully.

  “Oh, you could tell?” my mother asked, beaming. “What a compliment!”

  I managed a thanks, still gripping my phone, itching to vanish back within its comforting dimensions, of which I alone was in control.

  “We’re very close,” my mother went on, nodding in my direction to signal my cue.

  “She’s basically my best friend,” I muttered.

  “Well, aren’t you two sweet.” The waitress shook her head wistfully and returned to the counter. Immediately, I depressed the button on the side of my phone, lighting up the screen. Four new red bubbles blazed on at the bottom of my message app, but before I could open them up, my mother placed her palm against my cheek, forcing my eyes up. “You really are just so beautiful,” she said. “Your father will be so happy to see you.”

  I shifted in my seat, feeling the magnetic pull of those red bubbles. I knew they were probably just Julia and Blake, but what if they weren’t? What if it was Benoit, or even—my brain flailed wildly—Gemma, somehow? What if there was something that would change everything, render it all okay? That was always the hope that glimmered, however briefly, every time I refreshed my screen; it was like pulling the lever on a slot machine.

  My mother stroked my cheek again. “So what do you think you’re going to wear tonight?”

  “Uh, I dunno.”

  She squeezed my shoulder. “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll look great.” She leaned back on her stool and regarded her soup dubiously, letting her spoon hover just above the rim of the bowl. Hurriedly, I checked my phone. There were five more new messages.

  Speaking of changing one’s lewk, did you guys watch the new Botched last night?

  Omg those boobs!!!

  I was dying!

  I scanned the rest of the inane exchange. Yet though there was a sense of completion afterwards, there was no contentment; the anxiety I had felt anticipating its contents did not dissipate. If anything, I felt even more frustrated.

  “Honey, aren’t you going to eat your soup?”

  Regretfully, I put my phone down on the table, then carefully dipped my spoon into the bowl, swirling the unappetizing contents.

  “I’m going to wear this black lace blouse that’s new. And guess where I got it from?”

  “Where?”

  “J.Crew! Same as this blazer. Can you believe it? They actually have really cute stuff right now. Have you been?”

  I shook my head and stared at the amber-colored liquid in my spoon. A wisp of steam rose off it.

  “You should go,” my mom went on. “They have a lot of stuff I think you’d really like.”

  I nodded solemnly and then swallowed the entire spoonful, which burned the back of my throat and tasted, to me, like blood.

  The photo I put up later, of the half-finished soups artfully arranged on the table, my mother’s Celine purse posed just beside them, had the following caption: Bone broth with Mom > chicken soup for the soul. It got 3,356 Likes. A good mother–daughter relationship was part of my brand.

  * * *

  —

  I arrived at the Four Seasons at seven p.m., the appointed hour. We were to have a drink in my father’s suite, then head down for dinner shortly after. At the front desk, I gave a false name, which my mother had told me in advance. Apparently, they were afraid of press, even though this wasn’t Illinois and no one in New York City knew or cared about my father; in the pantheon of the city’s con men, he was small fry.

  It had taken me hours to get ready. I’d found my brain strangely muddled when I got home. I tried on dozens of outfits, but everything felt wrong, juvenile and unimpressive. In the end, I went to Zara and bought a black suit: Tuxedo Trousers with Side Taping for $39.99 and the Tuxedo Collar Blazer, $49.99. I thought my dad would think I looked “sharp” in it. My perm had frizzified a bit in the rain that night, but I got it under control with some mousse and pulled it back into a low bun and put on Glossier Generation G Sheer Matte Lipstick in Zip. At least an hour before I had to leave, I put up a photo of myself in the ensemble with the caption boss bitch vibes and a briefcase emoji. Immediately, my feed was flooded with Likes and Comments. Each one fortified my sense of self-worth.

  In the elevator up to my father’s room, I surveyed my look again. I smoothed back my hair and reapplied lipstick, feeling a certain satisfaction that dulled my nerves slightly. In orchestrating the right outfit, I had believed I was exercising a small amount of control over the evening. But when the doors slid open on the fourteenth floor, I felt myself tense up. My father was on this floor. This was already the closest I’d been to him in almost a year. Heart pounding, I tried to make sense of the gold plaque which directed guests to the appropriate rooms, only it appeared to me as a jumble of numbers and arrows. I set off in one direction, then another, before I realized that I’d gone the right way the first time and had to double back.

  My mother opened the door, a little breathless. She was wearing a lot of makeup, but it looked good; she might have had it done professionally, perhaps at Bloomingdale’s nearby. Certainly, she’d gone for a blowout. Her hair was parted on the side and fell in waves across her face. She was wearing a black lace blouse and a black pencil skirt with the Manolo Blahnik heels she’d had for years. We hugged for the third time that day, and she stepped aside to reveal my father, nestled into one of the armchairs with a foot on the coffee table and his cane supported at an angle by the nearby sofa.

  His face lit up when he saw me. I noticed there was a bottle of champagne, half-drunk, in a silver ice bucket on a console. The weather channel was playing, muted, on the TV behind him.

  “Mickey!” he called out. He did not get up, and I did not approach him.

  “Hi, Dad,” I responded, and was surprised by the sweetness of my voice, how it seemed to hold a note of optimism. I resisted moving towards him. My mother gave me a gentle push on the back.

  “Come here, girl,” my father called in a gruff voice. “Give me a hug.”

  Reluctantly, I went over to him and leaned down to embrace him briefly around the shoulders. He patted my back. My cheek brushed his neck on the way up and it felt clammy, like the skin of some dead sea mammal. His face was slick with a fine sheen of sweat, and he looked unhealthy. He had always been a large, broad man, but jail had turned him fat; he sat as if balancing a ball on his stomach, a large round drum of fat, which stretched his shirt tight. Otherwise, he was the same: wild, unruly eyebrows, neatly combed salt-and-pepper hair, twinkling dark-blue eyes, which he wiped quickly with the back of his hand as I straightened up. I realized he was crying.

  “It’s your perfume,” he said, smiling sheepishly, not even bothering to disguise the lie. “It makes my eyes water.”

  I laughed involuntarily. It was the same excuse he’d given at his own mother’s funeral, only then it was the flowers that irritated his eyes and made them water. I was eight then, and took it for fact, not able to catch the nuance in his voice. For the next few years, anytime there were flowers nearby I’d ask my dad if his eyes were okay, until one day he explained to me it had to be a very particular kind of flower, only found at mothers’ funerals.

  “It’s the kind of sensitivity one can develop when divorced from the general population,” he went on, a humorous lilt in his voice. “One may find the smell of one’s daughter oddly stirring, particularly to the tear glands.”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said, embarrassed. “Whatever.”

  He cocked his head to
one side, staring at me with a vaguely perplexed look, his eyes still misty, and I worried for a moment he was going to say something else oddly sweet, until he asked: “So what the hell happened to your eyebrows?”

  I blushed.

  “I told you, she dyed them,” my mother said, gently defensive on my behalf, or maybe it was only on my face’s behalf.

  My father looked aghast.

  “It’s the look nowadays,” my mother continued. “It’s high fashion.”

  “And I’m frightened to see you so thin,” my father said, moving on from my brows to my body.

  Another memory surfaced: It was my twelfth birthday and my mother gave me two bikinis. I had always been a skinny child—something my parents had led me to understand was a virtue—but I was going through a chubby phase at the time. I remember my father pinching the flesh at my hips and exclaiming gleefully: Soon you’ll be getting tits, too. My mother had slapped him irritably on the shoulder, but he’d just laughed harder. What? he’d said. Should I have called them breasts? Is that it?

  “You’re skeletal!” my dad exclaimed now. “You’re like Annie when I first met her and her idea of cooking dinner was to boil water. I’m telling you, your mother couldn’t have eaten more than a cracker a day.”

  My mother didn’t contest it, but quietly poured me a glass of champagne.

  “I’ve just been busy,” I said irritably and, shooting a derisive look at his belly, added, “Anyway, I wouldn’t talk.”

  He laughed and patted his belly contentedly. “I imagine some prisoners in Club Fed eat better than the average American. Steak and potatoes almost every day, followed by a glass of ice cream. And it’s all free! Now tell me, where can you get three squares a day, a solid bed, a roof over your head, and not pay a penny! No, jail’s not too bad. I wouldn’t mind staying in jail. I fell in love with jail! Wonderful group of men there, and it’s nice, too, being around only men. We became brothers, those men and I. It’s a heck of a whole lot less stressful than bloody running my own business and taking care of my family. The problem is: I’m innocent. So it’s simply not proper for me to be there. I wouldn’t have minded, had I done it, but the fact of the matter is I’m innocent, and I can’t stand for that kind of miscarriage of justice.”