The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

I felt this terrible knot in my stomach, an ache rising up through my esophagus and dying to come out of my throat, a loud wail, a horrible howling scream. She had cancer. She was sick. She was going to die. Finally Ashley said, “Well?”

  “Well, girls. I’ve met someone.” The words washed over me, spilled into my brain like the enormous wave I’d just been surfing on had exploded all around me, trapping me inside tons and tons of rushing water so I couldn’t hear or speak or breathe. “It’s nothing serious, mind you. But I’m going to go on a date with him. Just a dinner really. I don’t even know if you would call it a date.”

  “Okay,” Ashley said, all nonchalantly like our mother just decided to go on a date every day of the week and it was no big deal. “Can I go call Austin now?”

  “I thought maybe we could talk about it. If you girls wanted to.” She was looking right at me when she said it, and I looked away.

  “Whatever,” Ashley said. “I’ll help you find something to wear if you want.”

  My mother smiled at her, reached over for her hand, and squeezed it. “Thanks, sweetie. I’d like that a lot.” She paused and I could feel her eyes on me. “Melissa…”

  “What?” I shrugged.

  “You’re awfully quiet.”

  I wanted to tell her that I didn’t think it was right that she was dating someone, anyone. But I knew she and Ashley would gang up on me and try to convince me it was great, the way they did about everything else. The two of them were always like best friends, and I was the odd woman out. So instead I said, “Well, why would I care what you do? You’re an adult.”

  “Really, sweetie? You mean that? You’re being very mature about this….”

  I nodded. I wanted to know who this man was, where she met him, why she wanted to go to dinner with him. I always thought that there was one person you were supposed to love, and that once you used up your love with this person or it got thrown away or wasted or whatever, you were done. It had never occurred to me before that my mother was going to look for that love all over again. “I think I’m going to go start my homework,” I said.

  “What about dinner?”

  “I’m not that hungry anymore.”

  She sighed, and I knew she understood what I really meant, that I was not being mature, that I was not okay with it. I felt sick to my stomach, a terrible burning at the core of me. Maybe it was an ulcer. Maybe it would start to bleed, and I would go in my room and close my eyes for the night and never wake up. And then my mother and Ashley would be their own happy little family, all beauty pageants and body glitter.

  In my room, I didn’t look at my homework. I took out my seashell piece of glass and ran my fingers against it.

  It was crazy the way I could break this glass, shatter it so quickly with just one false move, but I could not kill it, not really, not for a million years. Whereas it was so hard for people to break, but we could get sick or die in what seemed like a matter of seconds.

  Chapter 4

  A few days later, in biology, I caught Ryan stealing glances at Courtney Whitman. She and her lab partner were assigned to the table next to ours, and as luck would have it, her partner was out for the day.

  We were all looking pretty stupid in our safety goggles and rubber gloves, picking through this poor dead frog carcass with tweezers. I had yet to identify anything; all the innards looked oddly the same to me, so it was Ryan who was doing most of the work and pointing things out to me. He didn’t mind because I’d promised to help him out with his English papers.

  So Ryan was picking through Kermit, cutting for the heart, our assignment for the day: find the organ, identify it, draw it in our workbook. I watched him look up every so often to gawk at Courtney, and as I was watching him watch her, I got this sick feeling in my stomach. Maybe she felt his eyes on her, or maybe she was just seriously lost without her partner, but she looked up and said, “Can I work with you guys today?”

  Ryan looked as if he’d just swallowed his tongue. So I finally said, “Yeah. Sure, whatever.”

  Mr. Finkelstein had paired her up with the odd man out, the only one of us not to have a partner, Jeffrey Gibson. Jeffrey was absolutely the nerdiest kid in our grade, if not the whole entire school. He had really thick horn-rimmed glasses and wore his pants up too high, and he played the flute in the marching band, and he was really, really into the whole band thing, so even when you saw him just walking down the hallway he was doing that funny rolling step that the band kids did on the field. But he was also incredibly good at science, and I had no doubt that he was the one doing all the work on the frog.

  So Courtney picked up her frog tray and moved it on over to our table. Ryan seemed to be concentrating very hard on Kermit suddenly, and Courtney leaned over his shoulder. “You have such a steady hand,” she practically cooed into his ear, so I had to roll my eyes. “Wow.” She popped her gum, which we were not supposed to be chewing in the biology lab, and I looked around to see if Mr. Finkelstein had noticed. Nope. He sat behind his desk absorbed in a stack of papers, and I wondered what he was thinking about. Probably not us. “You’re so lucky, Melinda, to have such a cool partner.”

  “Melissa,” I corrected her.

  “Oh. Melissa. I’m sorry. It sucks being new.” She frowned, and for a moment, I felt bad for her. I remembered what it was like to come back to school after a marking period in Philadelphia and an entire summer, and even though I knew most of the kids, everyone was new and different and everything had changed. But it was hard to really sympathize with someone so beautiful and perfect-looking—and you could still tell, even with the goggles wrapped around her head. Her shiny blond hair hit her shoulders perfectly. Her blue eyeliner and blue eyes only seemed bluer with the goggles. “And you’re Ryan, right?”

  He looked up from the frog and pushed the goggles up his nose. “I am.” He smiled at her. They kind of stared at each other for a minute or two and I started to feel really uncomfortable, as if I were interrupting something, which was crazy because she was at my lab table with my lab partner. “Here,” he said, and reached for her tray. “Let me find it for you.”

  “Oh.” She giggled and shot me a smile. “Thank you.”

  Ryan cut with perfect precision, as if our frog had only been practice, and with Courtney’s frog he was an expert with the skills of a surgeon. “Here you go,” he said after a few minutes. “Your heart.”

  “Thank you, thank you. I never could’ve found it on my own,” she said. He nodded, red spreading across his cheeks from underneath his goggles. “Hey, Meliss, want to trade partners?” She laughed.

  I glared at her. “No thanks.”

  “Just kidding,” she said. But Ryan was silent, and the notion that he would trade me away made me feel as if I were about to puke.

  I was still annoyed with Ryan after school, so I didn’t wait for him to ride home together like I normally did.

  “Hey, Mel, wait up.” I heard him call after me, but I didn’t stop pedaling. I pedaled hard and furious, my legs pumping, a hot breeze cutting through my hair.

  It took him a few blocks to catch up. I heard his heavy breathing behind me, and then I slowed down, afraid that he was going to have an asthma attack. “What’s your problem?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I just didn’t feel like waiting. Okay? I have stuff to do.”

  “Like what stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Stuff, all right? Jeez. We don’t always have to ride together.” I was waiting for him to tell me I was wrong, that we did need to ride together, that I meant something.

  But all he said was, “Yeah, all right. I get it.”

  We got to my house and we both stopped. He was still breathing hard, the breath catching in his chest in that thick, raspy asthmatic way that was so familiar that I’d become used to it over the past few years. I felt a little bad that I’d made him ride so hard. “You wanna come in?” I asked. “Or ride in the wash?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t. My dad’s home.”
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  I watched him turn and ride down the street toward his house before I went inside.

  The Saturday morning of my mother’s date, I convinced Ashley to drive me to the nursing home to visit Grandma Harry. Well, not so much convinced really, but blackmailed by threatening to tell my mother that she’d been driving Mr. September to school. She glared at me, but she grabbed the car keys and started walking toward the garage, so I followed.

  Truthfully, I could’ve ridden my bike. It was only three miles to the home, but the day was hot and the late-morning sun was bright and biting, and I didn’t feel like arriving red-faced and sweating to see her.

  Ashley didn’t say a word to me the whole ride over there, and when we got there, she didn’t even park. She pulled up, right in front of the Sunset Vistas sign, a name that always struck me as odd because it sounded more like a resort than a hospital for old people. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” she said.

  “Don’t you want to come in with me?” I knew she wouldn’t. Ashley hated visiting Grandma Harry since her memory got so bad. She said it was too depressing to watch, so she basically ignored her unless my mother made her go visit on Mother’s Day or Grandma Harry’s birthday.

  “Be waiting outside or I’m leaving without you,” she said. I got out of the car and barely slammed the door shut before she sped off.

  I didn’t go to visit Grandma Harry much because, in a way, I agreed with Ashley—it was awfully depressing. Talking to her was sort of like talking to yourself, because she could no longer remember from one minute to the next. She might ask me how old I was now or how the weather was five times within a span of five minutes, but she could still remember the past vividly. Sometimes I liked to go talk to her about my father to hear her remember him as a little boy, as a man. There were times when she forgot that he was dead. So it was sort of like stepping into this little fantasy world where everything was still unbroken.

  Still I paused at the door to her room for a minute, hesitant to step inside. I stared at the little placard on the door that said MRS. HARRIET MCALLISTER, thinking about how it looked awfully bold and official for a woman who was frail and shrunken and had a U-shaped spine.

  There was a time, when I was younger and my grandpa Jack was still alive, that they’d had a house in Scottsdale, and my father used to drive us up there on the weekends. I don’t remember much about it, but I remember Grandma Harry in the kitchen, wearing a red apron, putting trays of cookies in the oven. She wasn’t a great cook, and she usually tried to make her cookies healthy by lacing them with bran and neglecting to tell us, so if you ate too many you’d spend a solid afternoon near the toilet. But for some reason I can remember the sound of her laughter, very clear and mellow and almost soothing, and I can remember that she had this blond hair that she sometimes had in rollers still, if we caught her too early in the morning.

  This Grandma Harry, the one sitting up in the nursing-home bed, white hair thin enough to reveal red patches of skull bleeding out from underneath, skin wrinkled and shriveled and eyes slightly glazed, looked nothing like that other one, the one I knew so long ago that it felt like a dream.

  “Melissa, honey, is that you?” I didn’t know how long she watched me standing in the doorway before she said it, so I felt a little embarrassed as I stepped in.

  “Hi, Grandma.”

  She reached her hands up for me, and I leaned over and gave her a kiss. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy to see you.” She smelled like vinegar and pee, and I pulled away as quickly as I could and moved a chair up next to the bed. “Look at you. You’re getting so big. How old are you now?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Oh my. Almost all grown up.” She paused. “Where’s your father?”

  I stared at her, and for a second it felt like a game. Did she remember that he was dead or didn’t she? Did I lie or tell the truth? “He’s not here,” I said, which was a compromise, not a lie but not really the truth either.

  She sighed as if deep down she really knew, maybe in her heart, and I wondered if the heart held memories that the mind couldn’t. “How’s school?”

  “It’s good.” I nodded. “I’m at the high school now.”

  “Oh good.” She nodded, but I didn’t think it meant anything to her one way or another what school I was at. “How’s your sister?”

  I rolled my eyes. “The same.” Then I added. “She has a boyfriend.”

  “Oh my.” She paused. “How old are you now, honey pie?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Oh my. Almost all grown up.” I smiled, a big fake smile, baring my horse teeth, though I knew she wouldn’t notice. Grandma Harry never cared what you looked like or if you had makeup on or if you’d done your hair or dressed up nice for her. I love you for here and here, she used to say as she put one hand on my head and the other on my heart.

  “Did my father ever date anyone before my mother?” It was a question that had been burning up inside me all week, trying to imagine him with someone else, someone other than her, as if this would make her date okay, justifiable in a way.

  “Oh, well, let me see.” She closed her eyes. “Now that’s going way back, isn’t it?” She reached out for my hand, squeezed it. “Yes. There was a girl in college. What was her name? Oh, honey, my memory is terrible.” I nodded. But I knew it was normally her short-term memory that was the problem; she couldn’t remember the minute to minute, the day to day, but take her back twenty years, and she could usually tell you the tiny details of a moment. She opened her eyes. “Then, of course, there was Sally Bedford.”

  “Sally Bedford.” I repeated it, rolled it around on my tongue a bit as if this would make it real, the idea of my father with someone who wasn’t my mother.

  “Where is your father?”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, ducking the question. “I have to go.” I leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  “Thanks for coming by, honey pie,” she said. “Come back soon.”

  “I will,” I promised. I wondered, as I walked out, how many minutes it would take until she forgot I’d even been there.

  Chapter 5

  After I inherited my father’s journal, I decided I would keep a little journal of my own, where I would write down stories about people I knew, the way I imagined them to be. But it took me a while to figure out what to write, and the book stayed blank until the night when my mother had her first date. Then I decided I needed to start writing my parents’ story, because I worried, if I didn’t put it down on paper, that maybe no one would remember it, maybe it would disappear into something that had never even existed at all.

  My Parents

  The summer of 1986, when Cynthia Howard was Queen of the Rodeo, she worked as a candy striper in a hospital. This also happened to be the same summer that Tom McAllister, who was nearly finished with his degree in accounting, got appendicitis.

  Tom’s mother, Harriet, drove in from Scottsdale and nervously paced the floors of the waiting room as Tom went in for surgery. Tom was her baby, her only child, and she didn’t care that he was nearly twenty-one and not suffering from all that serious of an ailment. She paced and she paced and she paced.

  Cynthia watched her from down the hall, thinking that she must have something in her candy-striper cart to calm this woman down. A magazine, a teddy bear, a flower. “Hello,” she said.

  Harriet jumped. “Oh, hello, dear. I’m fine. Keep on keeping on.” She waved Cynthia to go past her.

  But Cynthia stopped. She put her hand on Harriet’s shoulder. “I could get you a glass of water.”

  Then Harriet looked at Cynthia, really looked at her. She was stunning, with ivory skin that you just didn’t see too much of in Arizona, and long, shiny black hair, a little pointy nose, and red lips, and she had such a warm smile that she made Harriet feel all at once at ease. Harriet said, “Oh my, aren’t you a beauty.”

  Cynthia smiled. “How nice of you to say.”

  Harriet took a seat and patted the chair next
to her. “Will you sit with me?”

  It wasn’t really Cynthia’s job to sit in the waiting room like this. She was supposed to walk the halls and check on the patients, see if they needed any cheering up. But she supposed it couldn’t hurt, for a few minutes. So she sat.

  Harriet said, “I want to tell you about my son Tom.” And she used words like handsome, magnificent, brilliant, funny.

  Cynthia was not looking for a boyfriend. She wanted a pageant win and a scholarship to college. Her younger sister, Julie, would get a scholarship for being smart, but Cynthia knew she was going to have to get there by being beautiful.

  But Cynthia let Harriet talk and talk and talk. Until the doctor came out to tell Harriet that Tom was fine, he was awake, and that she could see him.

  By then Cynthia’s shift was over, but she didn’t have the heart to say so, so when Harriet asked her to come back with her and meet Tom, she agreed.

  Tom was groggy from the anesthesia. And when he heard footsteps he looked up, and the first thing he saw was Cynthia. “Am I dead?” he said to her.

  “You’d better not be.” Harriet marched into the room.

  Cynthia hung back by the door and watched him. She could tell that Tom was serious, and his eyes were kind, and when he looked at her, it was as if she already was the Queen of the Rodeo, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  Then there is the new story, the one that is not perfect, that is nothing like a fairy tale. As I hung out by the front window waiting for him to arrive, I tried to imagine the way it might have happened. Maybe as my mother razored up his sideburns their eyes caught for a minute—that would be all it would have taken. I tried to picture him ugly and bearded, fat and sarcastic. But I knew none of that would be true. My mother might be too old to be Queen of the Rodeo, but she was still stunning.

  I got the phone and called Ryan while I was waiting. “My mother is getting ready for a date,” I said when he picked up.