“Like I have a choice,” Josh says. “My dad teaches at the U of O.”
“So does my mom,” I say, and he grins at me. “Only I didn’t grow up with her.”
“Harsh,” he says. And then he tells me that his dad teaches chemistry and everybody expects Josh to be good at science and he couldn’t care less and he’s gonna be an artist someday, but he has to get into art school, which is hard without someone supporting him—like a teacher or something—but the school cut art a long time ago and his folks won’t fork out for extra classes at the U because his parents don’t think artists can make any money.
“Who do they think does all the drawing for ads and comic books and storyboards for movies and games and stuff? That’s like the largest industry in the world right now.”
I nod. I get about half of what he’s saying. Mostly I get his tone, all peeved (like me with Daddy when Megan finally got me to let go), and kinda wanty at the same time.
Wanty, not needy. There is a difference.
“So that’s your dream?” I ask him. “To be an artist?”
He nods.
“Is that your goal, too?”
He frowns, like I just asked something weird.
“I mean, my therapist says I gotta have dreams and goals and I’m not sure they’re different.”
“Oh.” Josh’s frown leaves and he sips from that coffee again.
I haven’t even touched mine, but I don’t really want it.
“I think they are different,” he says. “My older brother, he wants to be an actor, but that’s another thing my folks think is a waste of time, and he accepts that, so he thinks he’ll get a degree in drama and teach it, and then act in his spare time.”
Now I’m frowning.
Josh sees it and says, “You know. Like his dream is to be an actor, but his goal is to be a teacher.”
“Why would he do both?” I ask.
“So he can afford to act, I guess.” Josh shrugs. “I don’t pretend to understand my brother. You got a brother?”
“I’ve got about five hundred of them,” I say before I stop myself.
He raises his eyebrows.
“Or, I mean, it seems that way.”
He grins like I said something funny, and I feel sad. Mom said that would be how people reacted when I covered. It seems that way is one of the phrases she taught me to fool people into thinking my honest answer was a jokey one, and I hated having to do it just when it seemed like me and Josh were becoming friends.
“You come from a big family?” he asks.
I nod.
“Did they move with you?”
I shake my head. “I’m my mom’s only child,” I say. “My dad—he’s—um—”
I don’t know how to say that my dad has been fathering children for thousands of years and while he’s married to Hera, he doesn’t even know the word faithful.
“He’s been married a few times, huh?”
“Just once,” I say, and flush.
“But there are other kids?” Josh tries not to look shocked. He sets his coffee cup down. “I’m prying again, aren’t I?”
I shrug.
“Look,” he says. “I think you’re interesting. That’s why I’m asking so many questions. The people who come to Eugene are usually pretty white bread, if you know what I mean.”
I nod, even though I don’t.
“So I’m sorry if I’m butting in.”
“It’s okay.” I look over at the clock. I only have five minutes to get to the waiting room. “I gotta go.”
He nods and looks down, and for the first time, I wonder if I’ve hurt his feelings. I did sound kinda harsh.
I touch his hand really lightly. His skin is warm. He looks up, surprised.
“Thanks for talking to me,” I say, and then I bolt out the door. As I run toward the streetlights, I see him reflected in the window’s glass. He’s watching me like he’s never seen anything like me.
Which he probably never has.
SEVEN
SO MOM EXPLAINS white bread on the drive home. I tell her about hearing the word (and hearing it describe Eugene) without telling her that I actually had a conversation with a guy from school. She’d freak out more than I did. I’m still wondering if I pissed him off leaving like that.
Mom says white bread means bland, plain, normal. She says it could also mean racially similar. When she moved here, she says, she was one of the only black people, and there still aren’t that many.
Now I’ve seen enough movies to know that black people doesn’t mean black, like so dark that you disappear into the night. I know it refers to people who look like my mom and people who look like me, even though Mom thinks I’m pretty Mediterranean-looking, like those ancient Greeks on the vases. It’s the dark eyes, I think, and the thick eyebrows, and the shape of my cheekbones, which aren’t nearly as sculpted as Mom’s. But I’m guessing because I don’t really understand this racial stuff. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Mom says there’s more ethnic diversity now, with all the Hispanics who’ve moved in in the last decade and the Asian-Americans who came down from Portland, but she says the town is still pretty white bread, and then she looks at me (she’s driving, but she’s not looking at the road, which I’m not sure is a good thing), and she says, “No one gave you trouble, did they?”
I don’t know what trouble would be, and I’m not sure I want to guess. “No.”
“Good,” she says in that tough Mom voice that I haven’t heard since the first day of school. “Because if anyone does, you send them to me.”
Now, I’m not sure what Mom can do about anything, being without magic and all, but I don’t ask anymore. The one time I did, she got all huffy and said that people without magic are still people too. Whatever that means.
We get home and I go to my room to pretend to do homework (I already did the stuff for the teachers who check: amazing how quick I figured that out), and Mom goes into the kitchen to cook dinner. The house is pretty small for two people, and I can hear her banging around in there.
I kinda get the sense that she wants me to come and help, but what can I do in a kitchen? It was tough enough learning how to make my bed. But after a while, I go in there—the cookie wore off and I’m hungry—and Mom’s at the stove using two utensils to move food around in this giant pan she calls a wok.
The kitchen is a great room. It’s divided into the cooking part and the eating part. The eating part has this big table (and I wonder what Mom used it for before I moved in because it’s much too big for two people, let alone one) and there are windows all around it, with French doors (dunno why they’re French, maybe that’s where she ordered them from) that open into the backyard, where Mom has this great flower-filled garden and two hammock trees (her words). There’s a fence, so the neighbors can’t see in, and when I first got here, I spent a lot of time out there, lying in the grass and staring at the sky.
The blue sky sometimes feels like the only part of my past life that’s still with me. And even that’ll disappear, Mom says, as winter comes and everything here gets gray or rainy.
Still, I love the backyard, and I love the windows that look out to it, and I love the giant table.
In the other part of the kitchen are these granite countertops with tons of appliances. Mom loves gadgets. She’s a good cook too. I asked her why she doesn’t get someone to cook for her and she gave me this lecture on self-sufficiency and how non-magical people (what a mouthful, I want her to say mortals, but she won’t because she hasn’t come into her magic yet, and identifies with these people) do everything themselves and enjoy it.
I’ve watched mortals at work, and I don’t think they enjoy much of anything. Yeah, they laugh a lot, but they bitch a lot too. And they talk about money too much, like it’s all important or something.
I can see where they get that because no one gives you anything if you don’t give them some cash first, but I think there’s a lot more important things than money. Like being able to ha
ng with your sisters or run with the centaurs or just sit on the stairs of Athena’s temple (she goes when the tourists leave—and sometimes she just banishes them [to where I don’t know]) and contemplate the universe.
There’s nothing like that here, and the one time I mentioned it to Mom, she shrugged and said, “There’s good stuff in Eugene. You just have to find it.”
Like I have the freedom to do that. She won’t even let me use her car because she says I need a license for that.
Anyway, I come into the kitchen and Mom immediately gives me orders. Set the table, pour the milk, make some tea. She’s training me to do all this manual stuff and she doesn’t care what I think about it. I have to “pull my weight.” I must “learn to be competent.” I need to “survive on my own.” And all of these things, the setting of tables, the pouring of milk, and the making of tea, will somehow do that.
I’m getting the plates from the cupboard near the sink, and as I stagger back with them (the cupboard’s kinda high for me), I hear myself say, “Mom, is it okay to like servants?”
Mom sputters and turns toward me, looking over her shoulder. At that minute, something in the wok pops and gets on her hand, and she curses and tells me to get butter. I do, but I don’t know what to do with it. She takes the wok off the burner, then holds out her hand.
There’s a red mark near her thumb that looks sore.
“Where’s the butter?” she asks.
I hold it out to her, and she grabs it with her other hand, then sticks her finger in it—which she expressly told me not to do that first day I was in the house—and rubs the butter on the red patch.
Then she explains about burns and how to cure them without magic and I’m watching like I’ve never seen anything like this before (and truthfully I haven’t) and I’m not sure why I should care since I don’t get injured as one of the magical and then I wonder if that rule’s been rescinded too.
Probably. I’ll ask Megan.
Mom picks up the wok and pours the contents over some rice she made (I didn’t even notice until now), then she hands me the bowl with the rice and the other stuff (broccoli, water chestnuts, mushrooms, baby corn, and things I don’t recognize, all in a brownish sauce) and tells me to put it on the table.
I do, she comes over and sits, so I feel like I can sit too. Then she says, “What did you ask me before?”
My face gets hot again. I wish this blushing thing would end, but I’m beginning to think I’m cursed with it for the rest of my life. I’d hoped she’d forgotten all about my question because it would steer the conversation too close to Josh and the stuff I talked to Megan about and I don’t want to get near either of those topics.
“I asked if it’s okay to like servants,” I say quietly. I don’t know what I’m thinking. Maybe that speaking quietly will prevent her from hearing the question, but then she’ll only go “What?” and I’ll have to repeat it all over again.
So what I do is pretty simple: I just load up my plate with food. That tends to please Mom, who says I’m too thin.
“Servants,” she says.
I shrug.
“What do you mean by servants?” she asks.
“You know,” I say, stirring the food around. It smells like garlic and ginger and stuff I can’t recognize and my stomach rumbles.
“No,” she says, “I don’t know. Illuminate me.”
She says stuff like that. Like “Illuminate me”: she’s not giving some magical command to cover her with a stream of light. She’s being all intellectual and stuff. Daddy says the reason I have a good vocabulary in all my languages and Brittany and Crystal say the reason I like to read is because Mom is all brainy. I think they’re wrong, but I am the only one of my close siblings (the ones exactly my age—all twenty of them) who likes to read and to learn.
“Tiffany,” Mom says with caution in her voice. It’s like a warning sign. Don’t do what she says and she becomes supermom, with anger that just makes me all quivery.
“Hmm?” I ask, taking a bite of dinner. It’s good. It’s like some Chinese food we got in L.A.
“Tell me what you mean by servants,” she says.
I’ve said something wrong, but I’m not sure what it is. So I have no choice but to answer. “Y’know,” I say, trying to put it off. “People who do manual labor.”
“Like what?” she asks.
“Like, I dunno.” I don’t want to say, Like cook dinner because that would reflect badly on Mom, since she just did. “Like, wait tables or something.”
“Those are servants?” she asks.
I shrug.
“You had servants at home?” She still hasn’t touched her food. My stepmother would have refused to eat at that point, thinking someone was trying to poison her. But I know better. My mom won’t poison me, no matter how bone-headed I am.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “We have servants.”
She probably missed them because she wasn’t there much. Besides, Daddy tries to make sure the mothers never see exactly how we live our lives on Olympus. He says it would spoil them. So we have a kind of fend-for-yourself party when they’re around at which, come to think of it, the mothers do most of the work.
My flush gets deeper. I know because my cheeks feel hotter. Have I just insulted her? I didn’t mean it if I did.
“And you’re not supposed to fraternize with them, I assume.”
Fraternize. Frater which has its roots in Latin and means brother. So I guess the word is some bastardization of brother and in context it seems to mean become close to or something, but I’m just guessing.
“We’re supposed to keep our distance,” I say.
“Because?” she asks.
“They’re servants,” I say in the exact same tone. I’m getting a little tired of the way she judges everything I say. “So you don’t want to get involved.”
“Because?”
“Because what?”
“What happens if you get involved?”
I shrug again. This dinner isn’t going well. My stomach is growling, but I’m wondering if I should take another bite because Mom still hasn’t eaten. Her eyes are spitting sparks too—not literally, not yet (that menopause thing), but she’s going to be a danger with this look when she comes into her magic.
“What happens when you get involved, Tiffany?” She’s a half step away from yelling.
“They expect things,” I say.
“Like what?”
I keep shrugging. No one actually said what the servants would expect, only that it was bad.
“Tiffany…”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Magic, maybe.”
“Who made the non-fraternizing rule?” Mom asks.
That one’s easy. “Hera.”
“Ah.” Mom leans back and wipes her mouth with her napkin even though she hasn’t taken a bite. “So if you fraternize with the servants, you might become like your father.”
“Huh?” I ask.
“Your father fraternizes with a lot of women, and…” Mom pauses, as if she’s considering her words. Then she goes on as if she’s come to a decision, “…and a lot of them end up like me. Pregnant. Pregnant women expect the father of their babies to own up to their responsibilities. Is that what Hera means?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “but I can’t father any babies. My magic doesn’t work that way.”
Mom’s eyes bug out for a minute, and then she laughs. “No, that’s true. But you can have babies yourself, you know.”
I know. Mom and I have had this talk, as a matter of fact, every year since I turned ten. It gets more and more graphic over time, and I don’t want to have it again.
“I’m still intrigued by this ‘servant’ word,” Mom says. “It implies an us-against-them mentality.”
I don’t know what that means either, and I’m getting really frustrated. “Things are just different here,” I say, stirring my food again.
“They are.”
“So I want to know how to treat the
servants. You already said to tip them.”
Mom rubs her forehead with the first three fingers of her right hand. She braces her thumb against her temple like she has a headache.
“You haven’t gotten very far in American History, have you?” she asks, finally.
“I’ve only been in school a week,” I say.
“No Constitution yet?” she asks.
“What?” I say.
“No All Men Are Created Equal?” she asks.
“What about women?” I ask.
“Precisely,” she says, then sighs. And shakes her head. “Okay. The short version: everyone in America is considered the same as everyone else. So you treat all people you encounter with kindness.”
This confuses me even more than the other stuff she said. “But not everyone is the same. Criminals are different.”
“Because they chose to break the law,” Mom says. She finally takes a bite of the dinner, but she chews automatically. She’s still staring at me like I’m nuts.
“And rich people have servants. At least in the movies.”
“Rich people do have servants,” Mom says. “They pay their servants. I suspect Zeus doesn’t.”
“We don’t have money,” I say primly, but I’m really not sure why the servants work at Mount Olympus. I was raised to ignore them, so I have. I have no idea if they got money or time alone with my dad (the women) or all their wishes come true when they’re done working. I have no idea at all.
“Theoretically,” Mom says, “being a servant is like being an employee anywhere else in America.”
When she says theoretically, I know she’s on shaky ground, but I don’t know why.
“So you tip them,” I say.
Mom shakes her head. Then she sighs again. “This is going to be tougher than I thought.”
She gets up and goes into the cooking part of the kitchen. She opens the fridge and gets a bottle of wine and a glass, then brings them back to the table.
It’s like the short walk gave her time to think because after she pours the wine (it’s red and looks as good as some of the stuff Dionysus used to bring us), she says, “To answer your question, yes, it’s okay to like servants.”
Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates Page 6
