Split Just Right

by Adele Griffin

  “Hmm. I never was one for sports,” says Mom. “Unless yoga counts.”

  I glare at Mom again for saying something so spacey and then I look down at my blue linen lap and try to take myself away from this dark room full of strangeness. I picture myself shooting baskets in the empty Bradshaw gym when it’s late afternoon in spring. The sun pours through the open doors, and all I can hear is the thud of the ball, the squeak of my shoes. I catch my breath as the ball wobbles, wavers, and then shlummphs soundly through the net. My mind takes shot after perfect shot, even after we stand up and move into the dining room for lunch.

  “Sit, please.” Mrs. Finzimer beams at me and Mom. “And please, start.” I sit and immediately take a roast beef sandwich off the platter in the middle of the table. “That’s right, just dig in,” says Mrs. Finzimer, pulling back a chair across from me. Mom sits next to me and clears her throat, her fingers touching light on my spine. I straighten up and adjust my headband.

  As soon as I’m into my second bite of sandwich, I feel Mrs. Finzimer’s gaze intent on me. “Well, you’re the hungry one. Is this when you normally have lunch?” she asks. “On days when you do go to school?”

  My mouth is full but I feel obliged to give her an answer, so I look to Mom for help.

  “Danny’s out today because it’s a special occasion,” Mom says. “It’s not every day she gets to meet her grandparents—grandmother, I guess I should say”

  “What’s taking Dad so long?” Rick Finzimer suddenly jumps out of his chair and strides out of the room, shouting, “Dad! Dad! What are you doing out there? We’re starting lunch!”

  “Ricky had perfect attendance records three years straight,” Mrs. Finzimer says softly smiling down at her plate. “Third grade to sixth. Not even the flu, not once, until junior high.”

  Nobody answers her. The back door bangs as Rick Finzimer steps outside. My grandparents have a squeaky back door.

  As soon as he’s gone the smile drops right off Mrs. Finzimer’s soft pigeon face. She stares across the table at Mom, her arms stretched out in front of her and her hands balled into one fist, like a mallet dividing the space between them.

  “He hasn’t told them, Susan,” says Mrs. Finzimer.

  “I’m sorry?” Mom’s politeness smile freezes and holds.

  “Ricky hasn’t told Caren and Morgan and Madison about you and ah, and ah, Danny. He’s not planning on it. Too upsetting, he thinks. And I surely don’t blame him. My boy’s had a hard enough time just getting himself on his feet, figuring out his own life. Now he’s got this baseball cap business going, and another family—his real family, in my honest opinion, and … he doesn’t need this, you know. He didn’t ask for this. None of us asked for this. Taking our name, even. I hope you don’t mind my speaking straight.”

  I wonder what happened to the sweet lady who pledged twenty dollars on her credit card to raise money for her son’s alma mater. The woman I am staring at has a closed, judging face that forces us to acknowledge her distaste of us. It’s truly a punishment to have to stare back at her. I feel the warm, salty beginning of tears in my nose and eyes. I glance at Mom and for a minute I think she might cry, too. Maybe it’s her braided hair or the normal clothes, but she looks more like a younger, shyer version of the regular mom I know. She doesn’t cry, though. She looks scared but she smiles, instead, and takes a deep breath. When she speaks, her voice is cold as the sweat that breaks across my forehead, but the sound of it dries up all my thoughts of tears.

  “I think maybe you need to get one thing straight here,” Mom begins. Her chin is level to the table and she speaks in loud, calm, careful words. “My daughter and I have done more than okay for ourselves for fourteen years.” Her face loses its fear and her voice builds slowly the way it sometimes does onstage, and I feel a kind of shelter in it. “Fourteen years. And no one worries about us except us. That’s the way we like it. No matter what our last name happens to be, we’re all the family we need. Anything else”—she presses the palms of her hands against the edge of the table and the skin under her eyes tightens for a moment, like a pulse point—“anything else is as unexpected as it is unnecessary.”

  The room is quiet, until I remember that my mouth is full of roast beef, which I then swallow with a loud gulunk.

  Mrs. Finzimer takes a baby sip from her water glass and licks her lips several times after she’s done.

  “Well, good then,” she says.

  When Rick Finzimer comes back in, Mrs. Finzimer unpacks her crooked-tooth smile and cements it right back on her face like nothing happened. I take another sandwich off the tray, although I can feel my stomach groaning from the weight of too much food.

  “Dad’s not … he isn’t …” Rick Finzimer makes a limp gesture with his shoulders as he sits back down to the lunch. “He’s busy.”

  “We’ll just have to get along without him, huh?” Mom clasps her hands together. Her voice has changed; suddenly it’s loud and full of pep and she reminds me of someone. Then I guess who. Mom has melted into an imitation of perky Mrs. Paulson. A pretty fair one, too.

  Two can play that game, I decide. Because right now, deciding to be someone else (finally, in one of the most difficult roles ever given to a child actor …) seems like not a bad idea. I raise my eyebrows and drop my chin, holding myself up straight. I look at my grandmother and try to think of what Antonia de Ver White’s eyes would see.

  “Tell me more about your cats,” I say pleasantly “They’re so beautiful.”

  “Why, let me think.” Mrs. Finzimer settles back with a thoughtful, storytelling look in her eye. “I must have started on my first cat just after Nixon was elected.”

  After lunch, Rick Finzimer makes another trip out to the woodshed and Mrs. Finzimer retreats to the kitchen to make a pot of decaffeinated tea and dessert. She doesn’t let us help her.

  “Go on out to the porch, enjoy the early spring,” she says, shooing us off with her hands. “I’ll be right along.”

  So Mom and I find ourselves alone on the porch in weather that’s just a little bit too cold to be pleasant. We sit on the rocking chairs with only the cats to watch over us, and we rock back and forth in uncertain, wood-creaking silence.

  “This is just terrible,” I finally whisper.

  “The pits,” she agrees.

  “If I could go back in time I would have looked a lot more carefully at those envelopes.” I hold my face in my hands and shake my head. “It’s so easy for me to get lost in my own little world and do flaky, distracted things like that.”

  “We all need our own little worlds, sometimes,” Mom says quietly. “I remember I made up this game when you were little, and we were still living in Philadelphia. I’d push you in your stroller and we’d walk in a straight line down Walnut Street, and I’d imagine that every block would unwind a year of my life, and then I’d think back on all the years of mistakes I made, like the year I ran away from my first foster home, the year I fell in love with Rick, the year I didn’t try for that navy scholarship because I could only do four push-ups, which seemed like more of an obstacle at the time.

  “Anyway, when I’d undone all those years, then I’d turn around and we’d walk back a new, different way, though Rittenhouse Square or Old City. That’s when I’d make up exactly how I would have changed each year, made it work out better for us.”

  “For you,” I correct. “If you undid the year you met him, you would undo the year of having me, right?” I glance at her out of the corners of my eyes.

  Mom looks even smaller than usual, like she would break if you touched her. Her face is thoughtful and she leans way back in her rocking chair, her hands gripping the sides and she drops her chin back like a little kid, staring way up at the porch eaves. She tips so far back that I have a hand braced to catch her in case she falls over.

  “Nope, never,” she says finally, and her words aren’t big and dramatic, but come out from right inside her thinking. “I never walked those blocks without you in
my plan. Never, Danny. You’re my family.”

  Her walking game sort of reminds me of The Odyssey, so I tell her about Penelope weaving and unraveling her tapestry, but Mom just gets that happy look on her face when she thinks of me getting my good Bradshaw education.

  “That Dr. Sonenshine used to teach at Amherst,” she says. “Maybe you’ll go there, one day.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Speaking of going.” Mom squints out to the driveway where Old Yeller is parked behind the Finzimer sedan. “You want to make a break for it?”

  “Race you.” But she’s already jumped up so fast that I just barely save her rocker from tipping and crashing over.

  Later, of course, we apologize.

  “It was that horseradish on the roast beef,” Mom explains over the phone while I sit at the kitchen table, a hand clapped over my mouth. Mom’s lies flow so effortlessly, it’s actually pretty astounding. “She’s deathly allergic, and when she started going into fits on the porch … Yes, yes, I tried calling your mother, but she was back in the kitchen. … Of course I rushed her right to the hospital just in time … Now? Let me check.” Mom looks at me and points to the receiver but I slice my hands through the air and shake my head quickly If I talked now, I’d start laughing. “She’s still feeling a little too weak to talk … Yes, I’ll tell her to give you a ring before you leave.”

  I call later that night, before Rick Finzimer’s next morning flight home.

  “If you need anything,” he says. “You have my work number.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “And take care. It was nice to meet you, Danny.”

  “Yep. You, too.”

  “Next time I’m in town, we could go have lunch or something.”

  “I’d like that, I think.”

  He says good-bye, and I hang up and breathe a long sigh. I’m relieved but also a little sad. When Rick Finzimer was just a smiling picture on the bookshelf, he seemed full of secrets and possibilities. Now that the mystery of Rick Finzimer has been solved, my imagination can’t control him anymore.

  “I don’t even know why I care,” I explained to Gary “It’s hard to say if he’s even worth knowing.”

  “But that’s what you miss—the person you’ll never know,” Gary said. Which is true. Whenever I miss Elliot, it comes down to specifics, like how he loved to listen to 98.5 Lite Hits, no matter how much Mom and I made fun of him. Or how calm he was when Portia stepped on a bee—Elliot just packed her foot with ice and baking soda and said, “Cry it all out, and the pain’ll go away quicker,” which is the exact right thing to say to someone who loves to cry as much as Portia.

  But I don’t have any memories like that of Rick Finzimer. There’s an ache inside me where all those memories should be. It’s a different feeling from missing Elliot, but it’s painful all the same.

  The following Sunday morning I slap my alarm off and jump out of bed, into the shower and then a pair of jeans, sneakers, and an old T-shirt. Mom’s already gone and I take the train with a fast-beating heart. I hope I know what I’m doing.

  Esther is waiting for me in the kitchen.

  “It’s real simple,” she says, tying a black apron around my waist. “Just clear the empty plates, dump ashtrays after two butts, restock the iced-tea stations, and you have to get lemons from the walk-in fridge. You know how to make coffee? Good. And do napkin rolls whenever you can grab a minute. You get ten percent of the wait staff’s tips; it’s all under the table.”

  “Okay, got it.”

  “Your mom’s really funny; she recruited me for the play, for Tom!—not that I’m any good, but she was always like, ‘Esther, you’re such a perfect mimic,’ so in the end I was like, ‘Okay I’ll give it a shot.’ It’s just a small part.” Esther squares her shoulders. “But I do kind of like to imitate other people’s voices just for fun. It was so weird how your mom just knew …” She smiles and picks up a box of Sweet’n Low packets. “Also, every table gets waters as soon as they’re seated. And babies get those special seats over by the bar. Good luck.”

  I spy Mom before she sees me. She’s putting an order into the computer and frowning, and a couple of irritated waitresses wait behind her, all rolling eyes and tapping feet. I guess Mom’s waitressing skills haven’t improved much since Portia saw her in action a few weeks ago.

  “Hey.” I wave when she looks up. “What a coincidence. This is my new part-time job, too.”

  When I see the surprise in Mom’s face, I’m glad that I know how to make a few good decisions alongside the dumb ones.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE TOM SAWYER MUSICAL slowly begins taking hold of Mom’s life, especially after As You Like It wraps up. The play wasn’t a big success, and they ended up closing early. Shakespeare is always something of a hit or miss at Bellmont.

  As the days count down to opening night, Mom’s at Bradshaw all the time, and even when she comes home, she’s still absentmindedly wearing parts of the school like a costume: a highlighter pen to hold her hair up in a bun, bracelets of paper clips or rubber bands, a few fingernails painted in with purple Magic Marker or Wite-Out. She seems completely obsessive and a little out of her mind, so I do my best to avoid her when we’re both at school.

  “It’s got to work,” she’ll occasionally say out of the blue, clenching her fists and staring at me.

  “Mom, of course it’ll work,” I always reply, but to me Tom! sounds like a play that’s bogged down with uncertainties.

  For one thing, Claire Knoxworthy, the tenth-grader who’s playing Tom, is one of the saddest sacks ever to hit Bradshaw. She’s a nervous, scurrying, beetle-faced girl whom kids have called “The Pox” since lower school. The name fits her, since she has that sort of medieval plague-struck look to her. Definitely not Tom Sawyer cute, unless you’ve always pictured Tom with goose white skin and a crooked Dutch Boy haircut.

  I don’t know too much about Claire except that she has a younger sister who takes the special ed. bus, and both Knoxworthy girls live with just their grandmother. Claire did distinguish herself last year when she tried to found the Young Astronomers club for Wednesday activities. People signed up with names like Ima Starr and Dija Moonme, but poor Claire didn’t get it and on Wednesday she even brought punch and vanilla wafers to school, because she thought she’d have such a big turnout. I heard the whole story when I was in the infirmary, faking a headache, and so the only way I can ever think about Claire is with RTs.

  “She’ll be great,” Mom says. “She has pizzazz, and her voice is unbeatable.”

  “Even if she is great,” I told Portia, “most people will have a hard time forgetting that it’s Claire. Claire’s just so … Claire.”

  “We’ll just clap extra hard,” Portia said. “My parents’ll be there, and Mom’s a professional at getting a crowd going.”

  Another problem is Ms. Kohlman, who plays the piano.

  “We have issues,” Mom confesses. I got to see one of these issues unfold when I stood in on an early rehearsal. It was during the Huck and Becky duet.

  “Huck and Becky!” Ms. Kohlman had suddenly shouted. “Move downstage now!” She’d stopped playing the piano, catching Huck and Becky midnote.

  “Too awkward,” Mom said, fluttering her fingers dismissively.

  “I’m not sure.” Ms. Kohlman stood, waddled on her stumpy walrus legs over to where Mom sat, and pointed up to the stage. “They’re losing the whole back of the house.”

  “Not at all.” Mom stood up, too. “You’re a hundred percent wrong.”

  “I think you’re being a little bit of a diva, Sue,” Ms. Kohlman shot back.

  “Who’s the director here?” asked Mom.

  “If you can’t appreciate other people’s creative input, maybe you need a new music director,” snipped Ms. Kohlman.

  “Bea Kohlman better back off,” Mom fumed later. “Too many cooks, you know.”

  After that episode, the rehearsals made me too nervous to watch. I heard that Ms. Kohlma
n and Mom’s regular sparring matches have been a source of endless delight for the whole cast, but I doubt the fighting has done much to help the play.

  Meanwhile, after my trial day, I got a regular position at the Greenhouse, busing tables for Sunday brunch. The money helps buy my train pass, but Mom makes me keep the rest for an allowance. Being tall and strong is an asset, and it makes me feel good when I can do something Mom can’t, like carry a tray or reach some glasses for her.

  One Sunday I lived out a pretty big nightmare when all the Finns came flouncing in for brunch. Of course, Lacy pretended like she had no idea Mom and I worked there.

  “Oh wow, that’s so funny,” she said. “Both of you guys. Good mother-daughter bonding experience.”

  “Better than mother-daughter liposuction,” I returned, but only in my head. Out loud I said, “It’s okay.”

  And it is okay, sort of. Some days I do feel that life has not been overgenerous handing out breaks to Mom and me, and I wish I could benefit from some of the stuff Portia’s got, like a beautiful house and perfect hair and a cool dad. But other days I think that working for my own money at the Greenhouse is more mature than getting handouts. As Gary says, it’ll get me ready for the real world, which isn’t quite as kind or generous as most Saint Germaine parents.

  When I’m feeling reasonable, I see it this way But there are plenty of days I’d trade being mature for great hair.

  The afternoon following dress rehearsal, Mom comes home hissing mad.

  “Dwight Lemmon is trying to get me fired!” she storms. “I knew it. Listen to this. He had the stage waxed. It’s got some kind of high-powered, high-resistance polish. You can see your own reflection in it. We should perform on ice skates. Lemmon says he’d scheduled to have it waxed months ago. I’m so angry. This could be it, Danny. Girls will be breaking their legs, literally. My bags might be packed.”

  “But you know how to ice-skate, remember?”

  “This is not funny, Danny.” Mom presses her fingers against her temples.