Split Just Right

by Adele Griffin

  “I have Tylenol.”

  “I’m fine.” Mom smiles, absently rubbing the small of her back with one hand, as if the pain is subsiding.

  “I didn’t know you ice-skated. You know, I live right near the big duck pond out in Ivycroft. Sometime when there’s some ice maybe we could—” Mr. Sallese suddenly notices me, lurking behind Mom, a giant storm cloud ready to block his sunny little proposal. I give him the deadeye.

  “That might be fun, Pete.” Mom’s smile is unreadable. Mr. Sallese nods and then, after another awkward moment, leaves the faculty lounge.

  “Come on, Danny,” Mom whispers, watching him go. “If you just say headache, they’ll think you’re lying.”

  “I’m not, anymore. It’s pounding, right over my left eye.”

  Mom rips the piece of paper from her notebook and scratches out my standard excuse, then hands it to me with a sniff of dismissal.

  “Good luck,” she says.

  Mr. Sallese stops me just as I’m dashing down the hall. “Your mother—you think she’ll be okay?”

  “Only if she doesn’t exert herself too much. She really can’t do things like go ice-skating anymore.”

  “Oh, sure, I understand.” Mr. Sallese’s head and Adam’s apple bob together in agreement. His glance slides toward the faculty-room door, and I can tell he wants to ask me something else about Mom. I turn and run.

  Over the years, lots of guys have used me to figure out Mom: what she’s like, what she likes, if she likes him. Except for Warren the gemologist, who hung around a couple years—I remember he used to give me rides to school on his motorcycle when I was in fourth and fifth grade—Mom hasn’t dated anyone seriously for a while.

  Gary—or lots of times Elliot, before—has always been the guy who takes care of the dad responsibilities. Gary’s who I take to all the father-daughter lunches, father-daughter picnics, and once even a father-daughter flag football game. Gary was pretty brave through that one. It seemed as if every time I turned around another aggressive Bradshaw dad had pounced on him and knocked him to the ground.

  “Bradshaw parents haven’t exactly opened their arms to the homosexual community,” Gary explained when Elliot and Mom saw the bruises.

  “Not yet,” Elliot answered, always the optimist. That was before Elliot got sick, when they were thinking of adopting a kid since they thought they were doing such a good job helping Mom raise me.

  Mom even told me once, although she wasn’t supposed to, that after Elliot died Gary named me the primary beneficiary of his will, since he doesn’t speak to his parents in Louisiana and doesn’t have any other family.

  “Don’t ever say I told you. Never, never say anything about it.” Mom had pressed her hand to her heart and closed her eyes dramatically, but I knew that Gary’s gesture pleased her, which was why she had blurted out the secret to me in the first place. Thinking of Gary’s will can give me the creeps and a safe, protected feeling both at the same time.

  But it was Elliot who used to get mad whenever I came home on fake sick days or when I skipped classes with bogus notes from Mom. Since Elliot was a play and movie critic, he used to work at home, so he always knew when I cut out early. I used to have to climb the fire escape and jimmy open my bedroom window to avoid him, and even then he would catch me if the TV or radio was turned up too loud.

  “School’s not an optional activity, Susan,” I overheard him say once.

  “Don’t tell me how to raise my daughter,” Mom had snapped back. At the time, sitting in my room, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream, and reading magazines, I’d thought, Yeah, Elliot. Don’t tell Mom how to raise me.

  But days like today, as I’m sneaking out the side-door exit of the middle school lobby and then leaping like a fugitive down the road to the train station, I feel a twinge of guilt to be cutting school. And deeper inside me, there’s that familiar hurt of missing Elliot, knowing that I won’t ever need to sneak up the fire escape again.

  CHAPTER 3

  HOME.

  The oven clock reads 12:16. I drop my book bag and the mail on the floor and drag myself to the couch, where I turn on the talk shows and bask in the lucky break of a March sun. Sunlight pours in through the eggshell curtains. I push my hair back from my face. Maybe I can get an early tan for the Spring Fling. I throw my legs over the arm of the sofa. Nothing’s better than an unexpected day off from school.

  Rick Finzimer smiles at me from the bookshelf. “Nice work cutting school, Danny,” I imagine him saying. “Couldn’t have planned a better escape myself. She makes it almost too easy, don’t you think? But your mom always was a pushover.”

  “Shut up,” I mutter. For some reason, I tend to imagine Rick Finzimer having this snickering, nasty personality. Who knows why; it’s not like I’ve spent any time hanging out with the guy, and he looks friendly enough in his picture. But it makes me feel safer, I think, having this idea that my father is a little bit snarky, because it puts me off missing him. Which I guess I do, in a way—although less intensely than I miss Elliot. It’s strange that Rick Finzimer’s absence should bother me at all, though, because why should I miss someone I’ve never known?

  The story of my mom and dad isn’t an unusual one. They met in high school, they fell in love, she got pregnant, they eloped, I was born, they fell out of love, got divorced, and he moved away to Vermont.

  When I was little he used to send me stuff: a cassette player that doesn’t work anymore, a string of seed pearls, and one summer an enormous tortoiseshell from Seoul, Korea, from when he had visited there to watch the Olympics. I love my shell. It takes up an entire corner of my room and I crawl inside it with my laptop when I’m writing, although now I kind of have to squeeze to fit.

  After I got older the presents stopped coming. Mom rarely talks about Rick Finzimer, but when she does, she makes him out to be this charming, brilliant guy, and his and Mom’s quick trip through marriage sounds like it was as full of fights and romance as a soap opera.

  “We had fun,” Mom will say with a smile from time to time. “And of course, we had you. So I have no regrets.”

  She should have at least one regret, but I guess they must have been having too much fun the day they thought up my name, Dandelion Lark Finzimer. There’s just no excuse to name a person after a weed, and they didn’t even have the ’60s to blame for it.

  “But I adore that name,” Mom told me once, dreamy eyed. “Dandelions are so magical, the way they’re always changing—first so sturdy and egg-yolk yellow, then a puff of lace, until they drift away in the wind.”

  “It’s a cartoon name,” I stormed. “It just shows how you were too young to be making parentish decisions.”

  Dandelions describe Mom better, anyway: how she’s always changing her hairstyle or her voice, shifting her personality with whichever direction her mood is blowing.

  The emotions between my parents seem to have drifted into the wind, too, particularly after I was born, because Rick Finzimer keeps in absolutely no contact with Mom or me. In fact, I don’t know any Finzimers at all, no aunts or uncles, no grandparents—nothing.

  Mom says she never knew them that well, herself.

  “But those Finzimers are a nasty crew,” Mom has mentioned more than a few times. “They didn’t want us to get married in the first place—thought I’d tricked him into it—and I’m sure they’re perfectly happy to have no connection with us now. Their spitefulness made the divorce very tough on me. But at the end of the day, it’s their loss, not getting to know you.”

  I can’t even remember Rick Finzimer, really. In a blurry way I remember living with the Massaras, and I have a clear picture of the broiling hot summer when we moved into 4M, because Mom put a leaky plastic wading pool in the middle of our living room and the downstairs neighbors’ ceiling leaked and we almost got evicted. I do have this hazy memory of a tall, blond, bearded man, but then I could just be remembering Gary during his country-western phase.

  Rick Finzimer’s remarried no
w, and he lives with his wife and kids out in California. I discovered this on my own, thanks to a little detective work.

  About a year and a half ago, I dared myself to flip through the phone book, calling all the people with the last name Finzimer (there were seven, but two listings were spelled with the extra m) and asking for Rick, please. I got hang-ups and busy signals and weird voices on answering machines, but I kept trying and finally I connected with a lady who asked, “Big Rick or little Ricky?” Her voice was polite and crackly.

  “Little Ricky” I crossed my fingers.

  “Well now, Ricky hasn’t lived here for over a dozen years.”

  “Do you have a number or address where I could get in touch with him?” I asked. My hand was slippery on the phone.

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Yes.” I read my preprinted excuse slowly off the index card. “My name is Megan Jones and I’m calling on behalf of Rick Finzimer’s college. We’re currently asking for alumni donations to build a new gymnasium.”

  “How wonderful. Hold on a minute, honey.” She clunked down the receiver and I heard her talking to a man’s voice in the background. When she returned, a little out of breath, she read off an address and phone number, out in Los Angeles. I copied the information carefully, and that’s when she told me, in a chatty old-ladyish way, about little Ricky’s dental hygienist wife and her grandkids. I wanted to ask how many kids and their names, but I got paranoid that then she’d start asking me more questions, too.

  “If you want to put me down for a contribution, I’d be happy to make one,” she said at the end of the call.

  “Okay,” I answered, and then she gave me her name, Paula Finzimer, and I took down her credit card number for a twenty-dollar donation.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Good luck with your fund-raising, Megan,” she answered.

  She sounded so sweet it made me want to tell her, right then, who I was. But I didn’t. I thanked her again and hung up the phone. Then I put on my sneakers and Walkman and shot baskets in the park for about two hours. It depressed me for a long time, realizing that the only way to have a friendly conversation with my own grandmother was if I were some dumb girl named Megan Jones. But trying to strike up a relationship with my Finzimer grandparents would not be a good idea without Mom’s permission, and I don’t think letting me get to know them is in her plans anytime soon.

  “Oh, those horrible, spiteful, awful people—that’s all in the past.” She shudders when I try to work them into the conversation.

  “Maybe they ’ve mellowed out,” I say. “Maybe they ’ve gone soft.”

  “Flea-bitten old curmudgeons,” she responds. “A pair of rotten apples.” And that would be the end. It’s not like me to open up a can of worms. I’m more the type who hides the unopened worm can on a back shelf in my brain, behind my New Year’s resolutions.

  From the phone book, I learned that my grandparents live about forty minutes away, on Poplar Avenue in Pottstown. Poplar Avenue sounds like exactly the right name for a street where grandparents live. Sometimes I like to think of them sitting out on their porch on rocking chairs, drinking bourbon or hot toddies or whatever it is old people always drink, pining for a glimpse of me, and wishing that, when they’d had the chance, they hadn’t been so spiteful to their daughter-in-law.

  Who knows what really caused the falling out between Mom and the Finzimers. Mom often revises her history to suit her taste, so it’s hard to get a straight story out of her. Her brain contains what Mr. Spitts, our biology teacher, would call a “permeable cell wall” between facts and fiction. She’s always changing story endings or beginnings or the parts in the middle. For instance, I’ve heard a lot of strange accounts of Mom’s life in “the system” before she was permanently placed with the Massaras.

  She told me about how she worked as a magician’s assistant in Las Vegas. She once described living in Seattle, in an abandoned house with a bunch of illegal aliens from China. A few times she told me about how she and a friend camped out in a department store in Newark, New Jersey for almost three months, dining on the candy, nuts, and dried fruit they stole from the glass cases, and sleeping on the showroom beds. She wasn’t placed with the Massaras until she was fourteen, but she gives them credit, she says, for somehow getting her to finish high school. My guess is that they temporarily put the fear of God into her, which has been proven to work on plenty of people.

  Sometimes Mom’s stories change, like instead of being a magician’s assistant she worked stacking chips at a casino roulette wheel. It’s as though she’s always writing and revising a different script for her life, but at least the stories are interesting.

  That call to my grandmother bugged me because it ended up being so useless and dumb, after all my hoping. I thought up other ways I would have liked the conversation to have turned out. I imagined the crackly voice growing quiet, then in a hopeful whisper saying, “I know that voice. There’s no mistaking the voice of a Finzimer. Is this my long lost grandchild? Is this Ricky’s firstborn daughter talking to me?” Eventually I managed to shove the whole bad experience out of my thoughts. Inventing scenarios was better left to Mom.

  Of course I never told Mom what I did, and I never called Rick Finzimer’s California number, since it would have shown up on the AT&T bill.

  I did finally get up the nerve to write him a letter, about eight months ago. It was a simple card that said, “Hi how are you, school is great, Mom is fine, sometimes I think about you and I hope you don’t mind that I looked up your number.” In my P.S. I added, “Please don’t feel like you have to write back. I understand how life can get pretty hectic—it will probably take me another week just to find a stamp to mail this card!!!”

  Life must be pretty hectic all the time for Rick Finzimer, because I’ve never heard from him. There are times when I feel stupid about that card and wish I hadn’t added all those dumb girlie exclamation points. Other times I think about it and wonder why I care whether or not Rick Finzimer contacts me. After all, I’d grown up with Mom and Gary and Elliot all swarming around me, so it’s not as if I ever lacked for parenting. It’s the not knowing that eats at me, I guess. The unsolved mystery of the man in the picture.

  The bagels are more freezer-burned than ever when I drag myself off the couch to make my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There’s only an empty orange juice container in the fridge, so I drink tap water and after lunch I’m full of enough energy to read Dr. Sonenshine’s comments on my creative writing essay.

  The Darkest Man

  He hung by his talonlike fingers onto the side of the steep glass mountain, a bold smile playing over his lips. The Darkest Man. No one knew his name, but when the simple townsfolk saw his silhouette outlined against the Dvorkian sky, they were filled with dread. The Darkest Man.

  What sounded so eerie a couple of weeks ago now just seems silly and immature. Dr. Sonenshine was probably right to slap me that 82. I skip through the story to her comments.

  Danny you have really managed to create a strange and fascinating world in the science fiction/fantasy genre. I wish I could go to a place like Dvorkia, especially during all this cold weather! I do think, however, that the character of “The Darkest Man” remains somewhat elusive. It would be interesting if you could develop a story based on characters and events that are more relevant to your own life. Also, please remember to run your work through spell-check and watch your verb tense agreement.

  The phone rings and I let the machine get it. “Danny pick up if you’re there.” Portia’s voice is angrily insistent. “I know you’re home. Your mom said you left with back spasms. Thanks a lot; I know it was just to get out of fencing, which went really bad without you.” She sighs, a loud leaf-rustling noise over the tape.

  “Anyhow, Lauren and I’re going to watch the Rye junior varsity wrestling matches, and I really hope she doesn’t ask Ty Amblin to the Fling before you? Because she said she maybe was going to? So uh … so c
all me tonight, anyway. Oh, and uh, I have something important to talk about.” She slams down the phone.

  “Doubtful,” I mutter. Portia rarely has anything important to talk about. And Lauren already asked Drew Brewer to the dance. Portia’s lies are almost too easy to catch.

  I scoop the mail off the floor. The March issue of The Lilac is in and now I’ve given myself enough time to prepare myself to flip through it. I know in a minute that my story’s not in there, and I’m mad at myself for searching for it.

  “Car Crazy,” “Let Sleeping Dogs Wake,” “Disengaged,” “Julio Underwater,” “Soap.” I read through the table of contents very slow, wishing for the words “Woodpile Baby”—my story’s title—to surface suddenly with the others.

  Nothing.

  I flip to “Car Crazy,” by Mark Gould. “Mike cared for his Ferrari better than his women,” I read out loud. Stupid story. Fifth place.

  “Woodpile Baby” has a way more interesting idea—all about this orphanage in olden times where babies got dropped off in the middle of the night, placed on top of the woodpile by their poor mothers who couldn’t care for them. One night a baby freezes to death and her ghost haunts the school, eventually setting fire to it. The end has everyone burning right up to a crisp, even the nice cleaning lady. It’s a very tragic, Stephen King-ish kind of story.

  “Gruesome and depressing,” Mom had said, but she let me send in a check to cover the five-dollar entry fee. Mom never thinks my entry fees are a waste of money, even though I’ve never won anything. “Let the world know you’re in it,” is her motto.

  Winning submissions will be notified, the rules explained vaguely.

  I hadn’t been notified. I hadn’t even been honorable mentioned.

  My head really does hurt.

  There’s only one aspirin in the medicine cabinet, so I swallow it and replace the empty bottle. At least the people at The Lilac who probably were all laughing scornfully at “Woodpile Baby” don’t know my real name. Whenever I enter a contest I use my pen name, Antonia de Ver White. It’s a name for how I picture a serious writer: a chain-smoking older woman with high cheekbones and a knowing laugh.