“I don’t handle you with kid gloves. You should take it as a compliment.”
“I do, I guess. But, wait. You don’t want a funeral? You?”
“Of course not.”
“What? I always pictured something huge with governors and senators and ex-governors and ex-senators and trumpets and pomp and circumstance and long eulogies and maybe some lying in state, whatever that actually means.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Or maybe like what they did with Lincoln. Put your fancy coffin on a train for a couple of weeks, go through a hundred-something cities, stopping every few miles to let the townspeople line up to pay their respects.”
“I don’t want people discussing me, telling stories without me there to edit them for accuracy. I refuse to allow others to get the last word, particularly when they’re just trying to garner attention for themselves.”
“Ah. Controlling the narrative, even after you’re gone.”
“I have always lived life on my own terms.”
“That’s true. Sometimes, other people have also lived their lives on your terms.”
My mother shrugged. “There’s a little thing called free will. But many don’t have the fortitude to exercise it.”
I wondered if she was talking about Trevor. Or about me. But I didn’t ask.
“I’ve written my obituary,” she said. “Henry Hill has a copy. He also has my will. Trevor gets a small sum, enough so that he can’t contest. Everything else goes to you and then to Avery.”
“By ‘then to,’ you mean when I die?”
“Everyone dies, Virginia.”
“I knew that, actually. But thanks for the reminder. But, Mom—”
“I know what you’re going to say, and I can tell you that Trevor has never wanted to be my beneficiary in any capacity. He’s disdained benefiting from my generosity, my expertise, my help since he was twelve years old. He wouldn’t want my money even if I’d chosen to leave it all to him. If he were to contest my will, it would merely be to spite me.”
“But it could be a last gesture of goodwill, a way of letting him know how you really feel about him.”
“Oh, I think he’s well aware of how I feel about him,” said my mother. She gestured to the far corner of her bedroom. I turned to look.
“Your vintage Louis Vuitton suitcase? You want Trevor to have that?”
It was from the 1920s, hard-sided, in nearly perfect condition. A truly exquisite object.
“Good God, no. It’s for Avery. I filled it with books I would like her to have, some valuable, others not. Things I think she would like. There’s also a note from me inside. I was hoping you’d consent to allow her to open the suitcase and read the note in private. I just wanted to give her something personal to remember me by.”
“Mom, that’s lovely. Of course she should do that.”
“Thank you. Please bring it with you when you leave today.”
“Oh, but why don’t I bring her by this weekend and you can give it to her yourself? Wouldn’t that be better?”
Then, my mother said, in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, “I don’t think I’ll be here this weekend.”
A shiver ran through me.
“What? Don’t say that.”
My mother leaned back in her chair, her hands resting lightly on its arms, her expression almost gentle.
“As I said before, I have always done things on my own terms. You know that,” she said.
I leaned over and put one of my hands over one of hers. We were not people who often touched each other, but for the second time in thirty minutes, I held my mother’s hand in mine. Her skin was soft, thin and loose as a silk glove.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I would like you to take this box of books and give it to Avery.”
“You wouldn’t do anything—rash, would you?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she scoffed. “I am many things, but I am never rash. I am also never desperate or despairing or whatever else you might be thinking.”
I nodded. “Yes, you’re never any of those. But please just remember—”
I almost said it: I love you. Because what I felt for my mother might not have been the staunch camaraderie I used to feel—mostly still did feel—for my faraway brother, Trevor, or the utter comfort of being with Kirsten or the weary but long-standing affection I’d always felt for Harris. Certainly, it bore no resemblance to my fierce, exhilarating, searing, bone-deep, sky-wide, all-in love for my daughter. But it was love all the same, love distant and fraught and inescapable.
I couldn’t say it to her, though. Saying those words would be like introducing an invasive plant into our fragile little ecosystem of a relationship.
Instead, I said, “Mom, you could live a lot longer than you or anyone else expects. You never know.”
My mother smiled. “When you were a girl, you used to love that phrase. You never know. Remember?”
My breath caught in my chest.
“You noticed that?” I said.
“You’d say it all the time, not with anxiety the way people sometimes do, but with relish.”
It was something that would slip my mind for weeks, months. How, once, I had been a soaring, iridescent girl, a girl who loved the mystery of life, the potential in every moment to tip over into something else, you never knew what. How could it be that my mother, Adela Beale, had all these years held on to this truth about me?
Then, she said, “You went full tilt, didn’t you? Headlong into everything. You were something to see back then.”
You know when you’re little and it starts to snow, and you catch flakes like tiny stars on the dark sleeve of your jacket and they are amazing, and you don’t want to move or breathe?
Finally, I said, “Mom. I didn’t know you saw that in me. I thought you just thought I was wild. Careless.”
And then it was over. Her face went sharp again. She said with bite, “I don’t miss much. Careless, yes. I noticed that. And I also noticed when you started to be careful.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
“What can I say? People change,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes they do. Sometimes, people go through a difficult time and they change.”
I flashed to the second half of my senior year in high school, my room with the blinds drawn, my body creaky as an old woman’s, my heart barren as the moon.
“That’s right,” I said.
“But then, after a time, if they have any backbone at all, if they’re not a complete invertebrate, they pull up their socks, find the part of themselves they misplaced, and take it back.”
I saw what was happening: my mother, controlling as ever, wanting to end the conversation on a classic hard-as-nails, acid-tongued Adela Beale note. Another day, what she’d said would have made me furious, but I smiled.
“I was something to see. You said that,” I teased.
My mother moved her hand in the manner of someone waving off a bad smell.
“That suitcase is heavy,” she said. “Don’t scuff the walls on your way down the stairs.”
Chapter Seven
August 24, 1997
Language has a way of turning ugly in my mother’s mouth. For instance, adjectives. She can take a perfectly decent, even complimentary word like “vivacious,” fill it with battery acid, and hurl it at a person, her own daughter, for instance, like a toxic water balloon, so that by the time it splatters all over her target, me, for instance, the word goes from meaning “effervescent” or “lively” to a synonym for some rancid, nonexistent word that means shallow, desperate, clownish, and tedious all at the same time.
It’s very clever on her part because if I get mad or hurt and accuse her of insulting me, she’ll say that she was not aware that “vivacious” is generally considered an insult and that I must be unusually “sensitive” to pick up on such a connotation. And then—if I don’t
just shut my mouth and head the hell out of the room, if I let myself get sucked in, which I stupidly too often let myself get—it begins all over again with “sensitive.” It would almost be better if she just called me shallow, desperate, clownish, and tedious. Oh, wait. She does that, too.
Adela’s favorite words to throw at me are a whole slew of synonyms for the word “idealistic.” Quixotic, starry-eyed, romantic, hopeful, optimistic. Obviously, it takes a very special kind of person—and an even more special kind of mother—to turn “hopeful” into an insult, but without raising her voice or sneering or even showing any facial expression, God forbid, whatsoever, Adela pulls it off.
And mostly, I tell her or myself or Trev or Kirsten or CJ or Gray that she’s wrong. Dead, dead, dead wrong. That she’s a hardboiled, soulless, cynical, embittered wrong person. Because when you keep your expectations lofty and your eyes full of stars, the world rises to meet you and glows to dazzle you, and anyway, idealism is just plain brave. And the beauty of the universe belongs to the brave! It should and it must and it does. It does.
But there are moments, heart-sunk, throat-tight moments, when I get scared that she’s right.
Tonight, Gray and I had sex.
I’d wanted it for so long. To be honest, I’d wanted it before I fell in love with Gray, wanted it as an experience, the way I have always wanted to skydive. The newness. The daring. The letting go, letting go, letting go.
But I love Gray. So I wanted it like that and also differently. Specifically. Gray and the barbershop powder scent of his neck and the way the tendons move in his hands and his torso like a statue come to life. And his low laugh. And how certain he is when he throws a football or a rock across water or anything.
I wanted him so much. Wanted him sharply like pain and constantly like a drawn-out ache. Feverishly and also with slow concentration and calm certainty. From a distance and also so close up I couldn’t tell whose body was whose. All summer long, I wanted him like that.
Remember that myth about Tantalus? How the water receded before he could drink? How the fruit hung just out of his reach? Until all he could think about was coolness slipping down his throat, his teeth sinking into tart flesh, juice on his tongue. Tantalized is what I was, all summer long.
“I want you, too,” my sweet Gray would say, his breathing heavy. “I just want it to be right, the exact right moment.”
Then, tonight came.
I expected it to be—I don’t know.
Splendid. Every nerve ending a sparkler.
Once, at the end of seventh grade, I took a school trip to Puerto Rico, and on the last night, we swam in a bioluminescent bay. I thought sex would be like that: all our movements splashing radiance, blue-green light pouring off our bodies, the bristling white stars overhead.
Desire, even the word has its roots in starlight. It really does. De + sidus. Of the stars. I looked it up, the way I do. Words are like people; the more you know about them the more interesting they are.
I expected us to have sex and change into something bigger and brighter and to rise up and be triumphant and jubilant forever.
It was over so fast. And, in the few minutes it was happening: oh, but Gray’s face, how it looked in the skim milk light coming through his bedroom window. Pale and scared and like he might cry.
Afterward, he was my Gray again. He buried his face in my hair and laughed his rumbling, car-driving-over-a-wooden-bridge laugh. He ran his finger down the length of my arm and kissed the inside of my elbow. He said, “My beautiful, beautiful Zinny.”
And I thought, “Thank you for trying so hard,” which was the wrong thing to think at such a moment. I know that.
But maybe my expectations were just too high. I was unrealistic. Overly romantic. Way too hopeful. Silly. Maybe the sky never cracks open the first time; maybe angels never sing. Maybe it was only disappointing because I was so sure it would be splendid. Maybe my mother is right that having faith that splendor and magnificence will come through for you is just stupid.
I’ll make it up to Gray. Even though he doesn’t know what I’ve been thinking, all these silent, traitorous thoughts, I’ll make it up to him. I’ll write him a sonnet, one with fifteen lines, so he knows that I love him too much for just fourteen.
Because I do.
September 15, 1997
My friends and I have always said we’d go to Hell and back for each other, and today, at the start of the second week of senior year, we did.
We call it Hell. Kirsten’s mother, who went to our school way back when, says they called it Hades and before that, she thinks it was the Underworld. All fine enough names for the basement of our school, which, when you’re in it, feels about a million miles straight down and as cut off from the regular, sunlit world as, well, Hell. I prefer the name Hell since it’s the most direct and least pretentious, although as you can see from the Tantalus bit in my last entry, I’m not above a mythical allusion. Plus, as CJ says, if you can’t show off what you know when you’re a kid and have basically just learned everything you know, when it’s all still shiny and new and you should be proud of it, there is something wrong with the world. Of course, CJ has a large personal investment in believing this is true, since showing off what he knows—and knowing more than everyone else—is arguably the foundation of CJ’s entire personality. But since it’s exactly this quality in CJ that led us to Hell, we can’t begrudge him it. Actually, we don’t anyway. CJ might be a know-it-all, but he’s our know-it-all.
Not everyone feels this way. In fact, apart from a few teachers, the ones especially comfortable with themselves and their own brains, most people give CJ a pretty hard time. He’s a flimsy little guy, almost translucently pale, with the kind of corn silk hair only toddlers and Finnish people usually have. Before he started hanging out with us in ninth grade, some of the meaner kids called him Al. When CJ found out that this was short for “albino,” he delivered a tutorial on the genetics and physical traits of albinism to any would-be bully within earshot, which, unshockingly, did not do him a bit of good.
Luckily for CJ, Lucretia Mott School isn’t exactly a bully stronghold, and even luckier for CJ, in September of ninth grade, he found himself assigned to a group history project with me, Kirsten, and Gray. At fourteen, Gray was already the starting varsity quarterback, something people claimed had not happened since the school was founded in 1870, which basically granted Gray a spot in the high school pantheon for all eternity.
Kirsten’s family is one of the wealthiest in town, and they’ve gone to Lucretia Mott for a bazillion generations, and she’s blond and tan and dimpled and was already curvy as a swimsuit model in ninth grade; in fact, she has all the makings of a queen bee except that she was somehow born not giving even the tiniest crap about stuff like that. Even so, people at LM who don’t openly worship her at least stay out of her way, maybe in case she decides to exercise her natural-born queen bee rights and sting them.
And then there’s me. I’m not sure how anyone else sees me, but I know how I see myself: fiery and funny Zinny, a rare bird, a wildflower, a comet. I love my friends the way I do everything: entirely.
Gray, Kirsten, and I—we are CJ’s circle of fire. We keep CJ safe.
The worst anyone does nowadays is steal his clothes, usually his gym clothes, but sometimes his regular ones. Not permanently. They always show up. Flapping on a flagpole or pinned to a bulletin board or stuck inside the school’s big front entrance display case with the trophies. Betsy, the big-hearted woman who has worked at the front desk of the school forever, keeps a set of CJ-size clothing in a filing cabinet drawer for when the thieves strike, which happens at least once a month.
Everyone knows the kids who are doing it: Tommy Fleming, Quincy Jarvis, Bryan Coe, a good-natured group who are just one slight remove from CJ-level nerdiness themselves. Coming from them, the clothes-stealing might even be a compliment, and it’s definitely turned CJ into kind of a celebrity. CJ, who has a seemingly bottomless capacity for worryi
ng, doesn’t really even stress about it anymore.
But then last year, for his seventeenth birthday, his grandfather bought him the saxophone of his dreams, an outrageously pricey piece of brass curvaceousness the sound of which I once recklessly joked rivaled the music of the spheres, which prompted CJ to go on a long diatribe about Pythagoras and celestial harmonies and the length of an instrument’s air column and musical notes and Aristotle, too, I think, along with a bouquet of pretty Latin phrases, and the upshot seemed to be that the music of the spheres was not in fact real and if it were real, it would not in fact be actual music, just math. But CJ does not dispute the fact that his saxophone makes a pure, gold, awesome sound.
The trouble is that because he cherishes it so much, he is terrified of ever not owning it. Which means, by extension, that he’s terrified someone will steal it. We have pointed out to CJ that people who have been happy as clams stealing gym shorts for the past six years are unlikely to suddenly graduate to expensive musical instruments, but CJ still worries. When the saxophone is at school, the band teacher Mr. Oliver keeps it locked in the band room closet to which he swears he owns the only key, but CJ still worries. Honestly, CJ is downright paranoid about it.
So last January, when we had to submit our proposals for our individual senior projects, CJ chose to research and write a paper on the architectural history of the school.
“It started off as a house built in the early 1800s, and then it was built onto, and onto, and built onto again. And in between, old parts were torn down and the inside was reconfigured over and over, and air-conditioning was put in.”
We were outside in one of the courtyards, eating lunch. CJ had just started researching his project and was doing the thing he did when he got excited, which was jitter his legs under the table and flutter his hands frantically around in the air like two white moths.
Kirsten leaned her chin on her fist. “Air-conditioning vents and drywall. Fascinating.”
Gray laughed. “It is, though,” he said. “It’s like the whole story of the school is folded up inside its walls.”
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