“I know that’s probably hard for you to hear. And we don’t have to discuss it anymore today. But I’m going to start talking to someone about it—to a therapist—and I’d like it if you’d come with me. Will you think about that?”
I hate the idea of going to therapy like I’m one of those crazy kids that my mom sees every day.
But what if I am one of those crazy kids?
“Yes,” I say.
“Good. Thank you.”
The phone on the wall rings. My mom looks behind her at the caller ID, her arms still around me. “It’s Peter, honey, probably calling to wish you a happy birthday. Do you want to talk to him?”
“Later.” I sniffle.
I sit there, listening to the quiet ring of the phone, feeling my mother’s arms around me for the first time in a long time. I can tell that something has shifted, and it’s both good and bad. We’re moving forward, my mom and I, but in order to move forward, we have to leave Dad behind in a way. And I hate that. I want to dig my heels in and refuse, but I can’t. I’m just too tired to fight it.
* * *
When my mom and dad were first dating, he took her to see La Bohéme at the Metropolitan Opera, and she thought it was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her. It’s still her favorite opera, and she wanted me to see it, so she got tickets for my birthday. To be honest, I don’t really love opera—when she and Dad used to listen to it at home, I’d leave the room because it always seemed to me like the sopranos were screeching—but I’ve never seen an opera live before, so it could be cool.
On Saturday afternoon, we get in the car and head toward the city. I have some guilt as we pass Union High—I should be seeing Robert in Macbeth tonight if I ever hope to talk to him again. But I’m just as happy to have an excuse to stay away from school until Monday. And I have no idea what I would say to him right now anyway.
An hour and a half later, we’re driving through the Upper West Side toward Lincoln Center and the Met. I look at all the huge apartment buildings and wonder what it’s like to live in New York City. I see every kind of person I could ever imagine in just a few blocks—all ages, all colors, all styles. I see two guys holding hands and talking to an old lady who is walking a poodle. I see some little kids cruising down the sidewalk on scooters while their parents carry groceries and try to keep them out of the way of a group of teenagers who are shoving each other around in front of a shoe store. I see cops on corners, crowds of people coming above ground and pouring onto the sidewalk from the subway, run-down delis selling hundreds of gorgeous flowers in giant white buckets, a black plastic bag blowing off the top of a trash can and getting caught in the corner of a bus stop where a guy stands, nearly missing the bus he’s waiting for because he’s texting like crazy on his phone, looking like his life depends on getting his message out.
Something in my chest eases a little for the first time since last summer. Life is moving forward outside of Union. There’s a world out here.
We pull into a parking garage and cross an insanely busy intersection where a whole bunch of streets seem to collide and taxis are flying through yellow lights at what seems like ninety miles an hour. And then, there it is: Lincoln Center. It’s a collection of a few huge buildings with a beautiful fountain in a courtyard in the middle of them. Behind the fountain is the Met, with crystal chandeliers hanging in massive glass windows that look like they’re ten stories high. I can see the audience going up a grand, red-velvet staircase to find their seats, and the unfamiliar sensation of genuine excitement catches me off guard. My mom smiles as we pick up the pace past the fountain—which is shooting water impossibly high in a sort of choreographed dance—and hurry to get to our seats before the opera starts.
“This way, this way,” the usher calls as hundreds of people press forward. We hand him our tickets, which he reads with something that looks like a ray gun, and then we’re swept up the open staircase along with everyone else. I clutch the shiny brass banister as we pass a restaurant on one level where people are finishing dessert and drinking coffee as if they have all the time in the world, even though the bell is ringing to announce that the show is starting soon. Some people are dressed in incredibly fancy clothes, like tuxedos and ball gowns; others are wearing jeans. Mom and I are somewhere in the middle.
A lady helps us find our seats in the front row of the balcony that’s called the Grand Tier, and we have to climb over a woman draped in a fur coat who gives us an annoyed look and doesn’t stand up to let us pass. I try to figure out what her problem is, but just as we sit, the lights start to go down, and the crystal chandeliers that are hanging throughout the room rise slowly to the ceiling like beautiful snowflakes in reverse. One goes right past my seat—I could reach out and touch it if I felt like getting thrown out or, more likely, arrested. The massive gold velvet curtain parts as the orchestra begins to play, and there, on the stage, is an entire apartment with two guys in it—one painting, the other, writing. I can hardly believe my eyes.
It’s not like I’ve never been to the theater before. In fact, I grew up seeing all kinds of plays with my family. But this is the biggest stage I’ve ever seen in my life—it looks like it could fit an entire town. And in fact, it does. The second act takes place on the streets of Paris, and there are markets and crowds of people and cafés and even horses—there are real horses on the stage, pulling carts while the people around them are singing their hearts out.
The singing is beautiful—it sounds very different to me in person than it does on the radio or through speakers at home. And at the Met, there are little screens in front of each seat that tell you, in English, what the singers are saying in Italian, so you know exactly what’s going on. So from what I understand, there are these artist guys who live in an apartment at the top of a building, and they can’t pay the rent. It’s Christmas Eve and they’re cold, but they have no firewood, so in order to stay warm, they start burning the pages of something that the writer, Rodolfo, has written. He doesn’t seem to be too upset about it, which makes the audience laugh.
When the painter goes to a café to drink with some friends, leaving Rodolfo behind to finish his work, a beautiful girl named Mimi knocks on the door. There’s something wrong with Mimi—she’s sick and constantly coughing, and she faints. But Rodolfo quickly falls in love with her. And then Mimi sings this incredibly beautiful song—I guess it’s called an aria—about how her name is Mimi and she embroiders flowers for a living and she’s sorry to bother him.
While I’m watching the opera, time goes by like it’s nothing. During the second intermission—after Act III, where it literally snows on the stage—my mom takes me to the bar in the lobby and orders a glass of champagne for us to share. She asks me if I’m enjoying the opera, but I can’t even find the words to tell her what I’m feeling as I watch those singers perform. Their voices are all so different, but each one is so strong, so powerful. And they’re acting, too—it’s not like they’re just standing there singing at the audience, which is what it always looked like to me whenever I saw opera on TV.
The bell rings for the final act. The curtain comes up on the apartment again, and for some reason, I can tell right away that things are not going to go well—the artist guys are having so much fun that something bad is bound to happen. Just as the guys are running around the apartment pretending to fight each other with swords, Mimi’s friend shows up and says that Mimi is too sick to make it up the stairs. They help her into the apartment and bring out a
bed for her to lie on. They go out to the street and sell their prized belongings so that they can afford a doctor and medicine for her. But I know that none of that is going to matter, and I’m right—Mimi dies right there on stage.
No one is watching when she dies—her arm just slides off the bed to the floor, and that’s how the audience knows she’s dead before the people in the apartment know. The whole audience is sniffling and wiping tears off their cheeks, including both my mom and me. Poor Mimi—she was too poor and too sick, and even love couldn’t save her. When Rodolfo discovers she’s dead, he lets out this long, loud cry, and he falls over her body, taking her in his arms and sobbing as if he couldn’t bear to live another minute. I can’t take my eyes off him, and when the curtain starts to come down, I want to stand up and protest that I need to know what happens next. How does Rodolfo go on without Mimi? What will he do? Will he keep writing? Will he write of nothing but Mimi for the rest of his life, or will he never be able to write her name again?
As we drive home, I try to puzzle out what the opera means. I guess there are two ways to look at it, depending on your outlook on life. If you’re cynical and you think that life sucks, then the message is that love and friendship are not enough, timing is everything, and nothing can save you. If you’re a positive person and you think that life is basically good, then the message is that Mimi was very lucky to find love before she died, because love and friendship and taking care of each other is all we have in the end.
I can see it both ways. And I can see how both things could be true simultaneously. Which, I think, means that La Bohéme is kind of brilliant.
Images from the opera are stuck in my head—the dingy but happy apartment, the friends running through the streets together laughing, the snow falling on Paris, the way Mimi’s arm silently slid off the bed to the floor to show that she was gone. I can still hear her singing that aria, and tears fill my eyes. I sneak a glance at my mother to see if she’s noticed, but her eyes are fixed on the road and she’s a million miles away, maybe back on her first date at the opera with my dad.
As I turn my head to hide the fact that I’m wiping tears off my cheeks, I have a very strange thought: could I perform? Could I sing or act and make people feel? What would it be like to create someone else? To be someone else for a time? Is it a way to learn who you really are, or a way to leave yourself behind?
My first thought is to call Robert and tell him that I think I’m starting to understand why he does plays. My second thought is that Robert isn’t my friend in the same way he used to be, and I should probably just leave him alone.
We get home really late, and I go up to my room and climb into bed, but I can’t sleep. The opera is still ringing in my ears, like I’ve got the stereo on. I give up trying to sleep, get up and open my laptop to go online and find out when the next auditions are at Union. When the screen wakes up, my dad’s memorial page is there—I must have forgotten to close out of it the last time I was working on it.
The page isn’t live yet because I still haven’t asked my mom if she’d buy the domain name for me. Well, that’s not really true—the page isn’t live yet because I haven’t asked my mom because I still haven’t chosen the photo. My cursor travels over to the photo folder, hovering for a second, and then I click on it. The folder springs open, and I choose “slideshow.” My father appears, grinning, his eyes hidden by aviator sunglasses that are way too cool for him to pull off. That photo disappears, replaced by one of him in the backyard, sweaty, digging a hole for a sapling that sits next to him in a bucket. That one disappears, replaced by another and then another.
The last photo in the slideshow is one I don’t remember ever really looking at before, though I remember taking it. It’s from the day he left. He’s standing by a car waiting to take him to the airport with his bags at his feet, and he’s leaning forward, reaching for my mom to hug her. I can’t see her face, but I can see his, and he’s not smiling.
No wonder my mom feels guilty. Underneath the brave face dad is putting on is sadness and worry. And fear.
I drag the photo into the template box, replacing the funny image of him scowling over the coffee mug, and I enlarge it. Now that it’s bigger, I can see that my mom is running to him, running into his embrace. The way her arms are stretching forward makes me think that she intends to not just hug him but hold on to him forever, to stop the plan that’s been set in motion and pull him back into the house so he can plant more trees in the yard and drink more coffee in the morning.
For the first time since Dad left, I wonder why Peter and I never told them we thought the plan was a bad one.
Does that make us responsible for what happened?
Just to see how it feels, I type Sending Dad to Iraq in the empty caption box underneath the photo.
I delete it the moment I finish writing it.
The cursor keeps blinking, waiting for me to come up with another caption. But the truth is, there is no other caption for that photo.
I shut down my laptop and climb into bed, exhaustion taking over as I tell myself there’s time, there’s no rush to launch the site, I don’t have to finish it right now. Later, I dream of a beautiful apartment in Paris where my mother, my brother and I laugh and eat perfect food and sip champagne out of crystal glasses as my father lies on a bed in the corner, his eyes closing, his arm silently slipping to the floor.
release (verb): to let go
(see also: breaking up)
20
COACH MORLEY KEEPS trying to get me to admit that Regina is the nail-polish stalker, but I won’t do it. If I tell Coach Morley, then she’ll tell Mrs. Chen. And I figured out that the information is more useful to me if I keep it to myself. Regina knows I’m not afraid of her anymore, and now I can get her in big trouble any time I want.
While I was home sick in bed, Gossip Girl reruns taught me a thing or two about how to hold something over a person’s head. Information is power, and I want to hang on to it as long as I can.
Three things have been keeping me going since I came back to school: my little advantage over Regina, the music from La Bohéme on a continuous loop in my head and art club. I had wanted to take art as my second-semester elective, but so did everyone else in the universe, and I didn’t get in. So when I came back to school, I decided to try the after-school art club.
I thought about trying out for a singing club, but auditions for chorus and the a cappella group happened a few weeks ago. It’s fine—I’m not quite ready yet to discover whether I can sing. It might crush me to learn that I can’t, so for now, I’d rather just imagine that I can, occasionally picturing myself singing the role of Mimi, feeling silly but also excited, like I have something to look forward to.
Taking anything that ends in “club” and meets after school is guaranteed to get you labeled as lame, but fortunately, nobody cares what I’m labeled anymore. I was sort of cool for a while because of the YouTube thing, but when the rumor hit that Richie Hamilton got busted at a club in the city and might have lost his football scholarship to Ohio State, I sank back into obscurity.
There’s some comfort in obscurity. It’s a nice relief from trying to squeeze into a world I have no business trying to squeeze into.
I’m terrible at art. I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t sculpt. But I like it. And I love the art room. It reminds me of elementary school, with student work hanging all over the walls. Ms. Botero, the teacher, puts people’s work up next to art
by famous artists. If someone’s drawing reminds her of a certain Picasso, she’ll find a poster of the painting and put it up next to the drawing. And nine times out of ten, I can see exactly why she thought the two pieces should be side by side.
Being around all the art, and around her, quiets my brain. Until the door to the art room opens and Jamie walks in.
Ms. Botero looks up and greets Jamie as if she sees him in here every day, which can’t be true because I had no idea he belonged to the art club. But I do remember that day in study hall at the beginning of the year when he was drawing that house. Jamie’s a really good artist, unlike me. Which is why, when he grabs his stuff off the shelf in the back of the room and sits right next to me, I feel a little intimidated, along with everything else I feel when I’m around Jamie.
Like, hot. Literally. Not in the sense that people mean it when they’re talking about passion. It’s like someone just turned the heat up to a thousand degrees and I’m about to melt, my face on fire. But, come to think of it, maybe that’s exactly what people mean when they talk about feeling “hot” in that way.
Ms. Botero comes to our table with an armful of books. “Jamie, I’m glad you’re back. I got these for you from the library.” She puts the books down on the table with a thud. “This is the book about Frank Gehry, and this is the Zaha Hadid. The Calatrava book was out, but I told the librarian to let me know when it’s in.”
“Thanks,” Jamie says. He looks a little overwhelmed by the number of books in front of him. Ms. Botero smiles and I realize that, aside from my own mother, I’ve never seen an adult be nice to Jamie, not like this. Ms. Botero treats him like he’s a real person, a person with ambitions and a future.
She peeks at my paper. I’ve been drawing the same flower over and over again, like I’m creating wallpaper or something. But really, I’m just trying to get it right.
Confessions of an Angry Girl Page 22
