Future Perfect

by Jen Larsen

  He snorts. He doesn’t say anything, but his foot is down hard on the gas pedal and I see signs for the 242.

  “How are we going to buy gas?” I say to no one. My voice sounds high and thin.

  “I have my credit card,” Laura says.

  The driver reaches over and turns the radio on loud, a talk station full of men shouting at one another. Jolene reaches over and squeezes my hand, which manages to squeeze tears out of my eyes. I squeeze back and keep my head resolutely turned toward the window, watching towns pass us by. I’ve never been to the East Bay before, and it looks flat and pleasant interspersed with strip malls, and then flat pleasantness again, all with a backdrop of hills dotted with houses.

  Over the Bay Bridge and there is Alcatraz, dark in the water, and the Transamerica Pyramid and Sutro Tower and I wonder what it’s like to see this every day, to have chosen this view for yourself. It is imposing. It is beautiful.

  We glide through the streets, around the traffic that’s still heavy, and then there’s another argument when the cabbie wants to just let us out on a corner.

  “I’m not driving up there,” he says, pointing up the block and into the Tenderloin.

  “You’re already in the Tenderloin,” Laura says.

  “Technically this is the Mission,” the driver says.

  “The Mission is two blocks that way!” Laura says and he mutters for fuck’s sake under his breath and swings the next right he can off Market, circling the block until I see the lit-up sign for Grand Liquors.

  “There,” I say, “right there!” I’m pulling my car keys out and ready to jump out of the moving car but he stops in the middle of the street and says, “Give me your money.”

  I’m pulling it out of my shirt when he grins and says, “Don’t forget my tip,” and all the doors lock with a click.

  Jolene reaches forward to give him two twenties and he grabs her hand. “How about a kiss?” and I stab at his wrist viciously with my car key and he’s screaming at me, but we can’t hear what he’s saying anymore as we scramble at the locks and crowd out and sprint to the car, which doesn’t seem to have gone up in flames. We pile in and the cab driver has thrown open his door and is stumbling over to us, clutching his wrist, but a police car is pulling up behind him and I pull out very carefully, putting my blinker on, taking the left slowly, and meandering up the block and away.

  “Oh my god,” I say.

  “Holy shit,” Laura says.

  “How did that happen?” Jolene asks weakly.

  “It’s my fault—” I start to say, but Laura interrupts me.

  “We’re okay,” she says. “We’re fine.”

  “Well, Grandmother knows. Is that fine? That doesn’t feel like the definition of fine.”

  Laura laughs, but I can’t stop gripping the steering wheel.

  “I’m never going to leave my house again,” I say.

  Laura reaches around the seat to squeeze my shoulder, and then we’re silent until we’re passing the exit to Carmel.

  Jolene turns to me. “Did you give him the hundred?” she says.

  “No,” I say.

  “Good.”

  “My grandmother—” I start again but then I stop.

  We’re quiet the rest of the way home.

  Laura falls asleep in the backseat and Jolene is curled up in a ball on the seat next to me. I pull off my left shoe and drop it onto the floor behind my seat. My right foot is throbbing, but it’s still an ordinary ride home, a straight shot down five lanes of highway through a corridor of scrubby trees. We are alone for a long time but as it gets lighter and lighter other cars appear, pacing us and pulling ahead. I’m not driving very fast. I am driving under the speed limit sometimes, I realize, and put my foot back down on the gas before I start just drifting aimlessly down the highway and off some random exit and park among the trees on a dirt side road and live forever somewhere in Big Sur, eating nuts and berries and telling the squirrels about all the plans I used to have, once, long ago.

  I still haven’t plugged my phone into the car charger. I focus on aiming us straight down the highway and nothing else, with the sky starting to get lighter and brighter and my headlights weaker in the gray light.

  We drop Laura off first. She glides up the walk and slips into her dark house. No one home, or no one waiting up for her, I think with a rubber band–snap of jealousy.

  When we swing into the driveway behind Grandmother’s Mercury, the sun is just about to rise and all the lights in the house are on. I think for a second and then back out and park on the side of the road. I’ve forgotten that I’m not wearing shoes. I feel perfectly calm, the way I imagine a circus performer does with her foot about to come down on the wire strung a hundred feet in the air. Jolene seems sleepy. I edge the front door shut behind me, but it screams and creaks at me just the way it always does. When I pause at the bottom of the stairs, Jolene stops.

  “Do you want me to come talk to your grandmother with you?” she whispers but I shake my head. She pats my arm and whispers, “It’ll be okay,” and I nod at her and let her go up first. I follow before I can change my mind. She smiles at me when she slips into her room at the top of the stairs and closes the door behind her. I take the next flight of stairs up and stop when I hear Grandmother’s voice.

  “Ashley,” she says.

  It’s not a question, of course. I head down the hall to her rooms. She’s sitting in her study, upright in her armchair, wearing her long dark robe and with her hair loose on her shoulders. I can’t say anything to her. She looks at me, all of me, and I realize I am grubby, my hair is a tangled mess, I stink like beer and pot and pee, and my feet are filthy and my tank top and skirt are just wrinkles hanging off me.

  “I was expecting a return phone call from the police department, not for you to actually arrive home.”

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  “You’re a disgrace,” she says. Her expression hasn’t changed. “You will explain what happened.”

  I lift my chin and look at the picture behind her head, a nondescript landscape in muddy browns and scratches of green. I wonder if it’s a picture my father has painted, because why else would it be hanging on the wall? My grandmother has good taste. But my grandmother is not sentimental. I squint to see if there’s a signature, but her voice is a crack across my face.

  “Ashley.”

  I try to meet her eyes but each time I am unbalanced by the way she is looking at me. I am hovering for a horrible instant over the idea, the tiniest sliver of an idea, of lying. I could lie to her. How could she ever prove I was lying? Why not just—

  “Don’t lie to me,” she says, and I sigh, the quietest sigh, which she raises an eyebrow at.

  “Laura’s boyfriend had an art show,” I say.

  “Omar,” she says. “That small boy from . . . San Francisco.” No one could have delivered the words “San Francisco” with more derisiveness.

  “So we drove up there. And later we took the train but got lost.”

  “Yes. That’s what the police officer seemed to have thought. Though lost wasn’t the word he used.”

  “We weren’t passed out,” I say, but I realize that isn’t true even as I say it. That overwhelming tiredness and the feeling that time had stretched so far and wide that I couldn’t find the edges of it anymore. “I didn’t think we had passed out,” I say lamely, miserably.

  “Well, you found your way home,” she says. She glances at me, up and down, her eyes dragging over every stain and wrinkle and bulge. “It looks like you crawled home from whatever filthy hole you were in. And now,” she says, “you’re standing there with that foolish look on your face like you’ve no idea how ashamed you should be of yourself. You have spit in the face of every single thing I have ever done for you. You make me regret everything I have ever given you.”

  I jerk back like she has just slapped me hard. She has never, never thrown her generosity in my face this way.

  “I’ve never asked you for anyt
hing,” I whisper.

  “Ah, but that isn’t true,” my grandmother says. “I have had to work every day since you were born to ensure that you turn out nothing like that mother of yours.”

  “You told me to follow in her footsteps. Go to Harvard. That if she could do it—” I’m losing my fight to keep my voice even and I have to stop talking.

  “She couldn’t do it,” my grandmother says flatly. “She wasn’t good enough to get in.”

  “She dropped out,” I say hesitantly. “I mean, she had to drop out—” But Grandmother keeps going.

  “Do shut up, Ashley. You sound quite stupid when you don’t listen. Your mother did not go to Harvard. She barely finished high school with a GED. She lied to your father about that for years.”

  “That’s not true,” I say, lurching forward, and Grandmother snorts, an undignified sound that she somehow makes elegant.

  “Enough, Ashley. Loyalty is lovely,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “And fairy tales are useful for children but it’s the truth that’s more important now. I have taught you to value the truth.”

  “Are you saying that—you’ve been lying to me. For all this time.” I am up on my feet and my entire head feels like it is burning. Nothing is right anymore. My mother is a stranger and I am an idiot and my grandmother is suddenly in my face and her voice is deadly.

  “Sit. Down. Now.”

  I drop. I could not stay standing if I wanted to. I have never heard her say these things and I want to make her stop.

  None of it is true. I have the proof. I have the photo of my mother—young, smiling—sitting on the lawn in front of Harvard Law School. A student. I want to make fists and shout, to push my grandmother back and make her just stop talking but I only sit there, and she keeps going.

  “I let your mother live in my house. I gave her a home despite the fact that I had forbidden your father to marry her. A home. For your brothers. For you. Do you understand that?” She raises a dark eyebrow at me. She looks young and almost soft in this light and with her hair down. She looks nothing like her voice.

  She leans forward, catching my eyes. She won’t let me look away. “But oh, she was ungrateful. She continually defied me. She continually turned her back on the values I raised your father with,” she says. “And then she turned her back on you. Because you were too much effort to actually raise properly.” Her words are bladed and rusty and dripping blood while they’re carving through to their point.

  I don’t say anything. I am staring at her and I can’t look away. She takes the saucer sitting on the table at her elbow and she lifts her teacup to her lips.

  “She wanted to name you Mariposa,” she says conversationally. She shakes her head slightly.

  “What?” I flinch at that. More things I don’t want to hear.

  She frowns and tilts her head. “I never liked ‘Mateo’ and ‘Lucas,’ of course, but I didn’t have the opportunity to say so. For you, she wanted Mariposa.” That slight head shake again. “I put my foot down. Ridiculous name.”

  “I—I didn’t know,” I say numbly.

  “Imagine, her naming you butterfly, and then you growing up to—this.” She gestures at my body, and I flinch again. “I have been looking out for you since before you were born, my darling.”

  I look down at myself, the rumpled tank and my boobs spilling out the top and the strap stretched out and falling down my arm and the width of my lap and the broadness of my knuckles and I see what she’s saying. I’m living inside what she’s saying. My gift from my mother.

  “And now you’re acting like you’ve been raised by her.” She sighs. “Pretty girls like that Laura can get away with it, darling. Not you.”

  I drop my head. I don’t know when I started crying, but there are tears sliding off my chin and my cheeks are wet with them.

  She says, “I see you have my point.”

  I’m dizzy. I don’t answer.

  She sets her teacup and saucer back down. “Your mother could not, as they say, get her act together.” She clasps her hands on her knee. “Can you? Or are you as bad as she was?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You are not like her, Ashley. You are better. You are stronger. You have me in you.” She looks at me again, a more kindly survey of my body that doesn’t feel less painful. “Shower,” she says. “Sleep. We are going out to select your interview clothes this afternoon.”

  I lift my head. “My interview,” I say.

  “Your Harvard interview,” she says. She gestures at her desk, and I stare at her. “Get up and get the envelope,” she says.

  The envelope is addressed to me, torn open. The letter says, following up on our email earlier this week, we’d like to invite you to meet with a Harvard alumnus as the next step in your application and then it blurs and washes out and I drop the note.

  “Okay,” I say. The only thing I can think is, I thought my mother had an interview at Harvard. My mother never had an interview at Harvard.

  “Do you see why I was so worried about you? Do you see why I was so angry? You can’t jeopardize your future. You’re so close.”

  I’m staring at the letter on the floor.

  “Go,” she says, and I turn and walk down the hall and down the stairs and into the bathroom and I sit on the closed toilet and realize that the last thing I can do right now is strip down naked. I leave the bathroom. My bedroom is already bright, and the scarves draped over the curtain rod are stirring in the breeze coming through the window, tinting the light pink. I climb into bed fully clothed, burrowing under all the blankets and dragging the pillow over my head and doing my damnedest to not think of anything at all until it gets so easy because everything goes dark.

  Everyone has the same anxiety dreams. You’ve missed a test, or you suddenly realize you’ve forgotten to go to class all year and the final is right now and you’re late because it’s in an entirely different wing of the building you’ve never been to and it’s filled with monkeys and you can’t graduate unless you take this test and get it one hundred percent correct, every question, and all of them are written in hieroglyphics. Or you’ve lost the dogs, all of them, they’ve all gotten out the front door because you left it open and they’ve scattered across the neighborhood and it’s getting dark and they are lost and alone and it is your fault. Or that your grandmother is a zombie and she is faster than you and smarter and her basic instinctual drive is pushing her forward relentlessly and you are in an endless hallway of wooden doors and every door is locked and she’s right behind you with the floorboards shrieking your name under every one of her heavy footfalls.

  Classic.

  I fling the covers off and drag myself up and look at the window, still bright. I can’t tell what time it is. My phone is in the car, right. And I am filthy, I think, looking at the trails of greasy dirt streaking down my arms. I drag all the sheets and pillows and blankets off the bed with me, because they will need to be washed at least twice, and sneak across the hall into the bathroom and run the water hot. The water stings my foot and I scrub it clean, wincing but not caring. I am fast and quick and I put my hair in a wet ponytail, even though I know grandmother hates that but she’d hate that I was late even more, and I wish I had pants that weren’t jeans or a top that wasn’t a T-shirt or something low cut, but I settle on something plain and black and closed-toe flats because haven’t my feet suffered enough.

  Grandmother doesn’t say anything when I come downstairs and she’s silent in the car. She is all straight angles, elegantly geometrical, and she is hard to look at directly. We pull into the parking spot in front of Lane Bryant and she sighs. She hates this store. I hate this store. Laura thinks this store is an abomination. But my grandmother is ruthlessly efficient. She walks past all the hangers and the mannequins wearing clothes that are floaty, printed, sporting an empire waist, contrasting trim, embellished with lace or sequins or sparkling threads or strange buttons or—any of the thousands of things that fat-clothes designers want fat g
irls to wear because maybe enough shiny, sparkly, ruffly bits will fool the eye into thinking you’re not actually fat.

  My grandmother knows how to strike at the heart of things. She finds slacks that don’t have a tuxedo stripe down the side or Lurex pinstripes or an attached brass belt studded with jewels. She glances at me and takes the 16s, the 18s, and the 20s off the rack and I hold my breath but she takes the 22s as well and something about that feels like betrayal. Like the problem isn’t my weight or her worry about me and my future or my potential. The problem is that she doesn’t see me. She doesn’t see my body as more than a problem and I am there lost in it, standing next to her in a hushed, dimly lit carpeted cavern that seems huge but I remember the Forever 21 in San Francisco, the marble mansion full of clothes for girls who have single digits in their size numbers and nothing holding them back.

  She holds out her stack of pants and I take them all and wrap them up in my arms and follow behind her, letting her flip through all the blouses that become indistinguishable from one another. They all look like shirts to me in sizes that might fit me, which is strange because I have never felt quite so small.

  A woman peeks around the side of a clothes rack and says, “Hi there! My name is Flora! Can I help you find anything?”

  My grandmother looks her up and down and seems very discouraged. Flora is a fat girl as brown as me, dressed in the floatiest pink-and-yellow watercolor top with a keyhole neck tied at the top in a bow and the beaded ends disappearing into her amazing cleavage. Her skirt swirls around her ankles in burgundies and greens when she steps around the rack and clasps her hands in front of her and smiles at us. Pink toenails, I think numbly for no reason. Her sandals are bronze.

  “I am not convinced,” my grandmother says.

  “I’m sorry?” Flora says, dipping her head down a bit like she’s tryng to get close enough to hear.

  “My granddaughter has an interview at Harvard,” Grandmother says. “We need a suit. Something that isn’t frivolous.”