How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else)

by Ann Hood

  We drove through the streets of beautiful Boston and I tried to memorize all the buildings, like the old State House, so that when I got home I could play them back in my mind.

  “They moved,” my mother said suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “The Palmers. Rose’s family. They moved to Cleveland. We got a card at Christmas.”

  Then I got really mad because she hadn’t even bothered to tell me. “Cleveland?” I said. If it wasn’t a state capital, I didn’t necessarily know which state something was in.

  “Cleveland. Ohio,” she said.

  “Capital, Columbus,” I said, satisfied. I wondered how Poppy and Marigold were managing now, and smiled, relieved, I guess, that someone else in the world might be unhappy like me.

  My mother was pulling up in front of the Ritz-Carlton, and letting the valet take our car. This was all feeling like a celebration, but my mother looked really glum. Her jaw was set kind of weird and she kept avoiding eye contact with me. Always a bad sign. Inside, we sat in the beautiful dining room and the waiters in their tuxedos treated us like movie stars. It was the first time I’d ever been there when they didn’t bring me a coloring book and crayons, which meant I looked mature and sophisticated. Ballerinas can extend their necks and hold their chins just so for effect. I did this, imagining Madame instructing me: “Reach, Madeline. Reach!”

  “What’s wrong with your neck?” my mother said.

  She really didn’t know anything about anything. I wondered how, just a few short months ago, I used to think she was smart. Outside the window was the Boston Common and the Public Gardens, and I looked at them instead of her, stretching my neck. Reaching, reaching.

  “Did you twist it or something in class?” she said, and I chose to ignore her.

  I ordered Lapsang tea because the name was lyrical (new vocabulary word, number 100), and I filled my plate with all the miniature cakes and things, but my mother, who ordered Earl Grey, the most boring tea ever, just sat there.

  When my mouth was full of scone, she said, “Well, Madeline, the thing is…”

  Then she stopped talking and I stopped chewing and then she said, “Have you ever heard of the Providence Ballet Company? The ones who do The Nutcracker every year in Providence? In a college auditorium?”

  I kept chewing, worried.

  “Well,” she said, “actually, I spoke to the teacher you would have there, Misty Glenn? And she said that they might be able to use a real theater this year.”

  “The teacher I would have?” I said. My scone had turned all dry in my mouth and I considered spitting it out. But you just don’t spit out scones at the Ritz-Carlton. It isn’t ballerina-like. It isn’t even saintlike.

  “Oh, Madeline,” she said, and her face crumpled the way it did right before she started to cry. “I just can’t do it anymore.”

  “Do what?” I said. I glanced around to make sure no one was watching her. But the room was full of a bunch of old ladies in wool suits and gray buns, sipping and staring at nothing at all.

  “Ever since your father left, I am having organizational problems,” she said. She made a weird face, trying not to cry.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “This drive into Boston every Saturday is too much. The traffic, the time, finding someone to watch Cody, Cody crying because he doesn’t want me to leave him, the cost of this class over one that’s literally right down the street from home—”

  My face didn’t crumple. I didn’t twist it all funny. I just cried. Hard. My mother had already driven my father away, and now she was taking the one thing that mattered the most in the world to me. Maybe God was testing me or something. Aren’t saints supposed to be tested? But this was too much. She was telling me how I would be in the advanced class with Misty Glenn. She was telling me that soon they were having auditions for a ballet set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and I could try out. But all I could do was sit there and cry and hate her even more.

  Then, the next week, she gave me more bad news.

  “It’s going to be the trip of a lifetime,” my mother said. Of course I didn’t believe her. She was an expert on exactly nothing. Unless you counted messing up lives. That she was excellent at. For starters, I now took ballet lessons with a woman who looked like a cheerleader and chewed gum while she showed us what to do. Also, her cell phone always rang during class and her ring tone was the theme from The Addams Family TV show.

  I watched my mother lay a bunch of maps and guidebooks on the kitchen table.

  “Naples,” she said, opening one of the books to a picture of happy people eating pizza at an outdoor café. “Florence,” she said, opening a different book and pointing to an enormous statue of a naked man. “This,” she said, “is Michelangelo’s David.”

  “Who cares?” I said, and made myself yawn.

  “Imagine it,” she said. “Pompeii! Pizza! Italy! I can’t say enough about Italy!”

  My mother has the plainest face in the world. Her eyes are brown, her hair is brown. All ordinary. She likes to remind me that when I was little I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Last time she said that, I told her, “Oh, really? Well, I also thought Mount Rushmore got that way naturally. So I guess I made a lot of mistakes.” This was called a zinger, and Sophie and I practiced them sometimes after school if she had nothing better to do. Zingers are mean. Lately, sometimes I get a strong urge to be mean to my mother.

  “What do you think?” she said now in her best upbeat voice.

  “I think you should wear lipstick every day,” I said. That was not a zinger. That was sarcasm, which is even harder.

  “Thank you for the beauty advice, Madeline,” she said. She didn’t sound upbeat anymore. I smiled at her and she smiled back, both of us sarcastic. “Now tell me what you think about our trip to Italy.”

  I said, “I don’t want to go.”

  Outside, it was still winter, a rainy gray winter. The streets of Providence were like an obstacle course of puddles and slush and old snow that had gone dirty and hard.

  “Of course you want to go to Italy,” my mother said. “Everybody wants to go to Italy. It’s something people want.”

  “Well, I want to go to New York City and spend the summer with Daddy. He said he’ll take me to the ballet. He said he’ll take me to Queens where there’s a painting of a saint that weeps. Real tears,” I added because I could read my mother’s mind and knew she was thinking it was a hoax.

  Then, to be good and rude, I opened up the book The Song of Bernadette about how a peasant girl in France saw the Virgin Mary and got all of these orders from her, like to build a church in a particular place and have sick people come and bathe in water from the spring. Bernadette became a saint. I was keeping a list of what I had in common with other saints, and number one on my list was that I was a peasant, too. It looked like rich people never got to be saints, so that eliminated Sophie.

  “Besides,” I said to my mother, “I thought we didn’t have any money. I thought we were peasants. How can a bunch of peasants afford to go to Italy?” We had read about peasants in school, too. Peasants tilled the land, we learned. They were poor, but they were good, hardworking people.

  “Peasants!” my mother shrieked.

  “Peasants helped people,” I told her. “In World War Two. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “What has gotten into you?” she mumbled under her breath.

  I knew what she was thinking. She talked about it with Mrs. Harrison all the time.

  They were embarrassing, those talks. And she and Mrs. Harrison had them right in front of me, as if I were invisible. “It’s those teen years I read about when she was tiny,” my mother said. “They seemed so far away, so unlikely then.” Just yesterday, when Mrs. Harrison came to pick me up for school and I refused to wear the silly, bright yellow slicker and matching boots my mother had bought me as if I were a baby duckling instead of a twelve-year-old—a miracle worker, a soon-to-be saint—she shouted from
the porch to Mrs. Harrison, “She still wears flowered underpants but these are too babyish.” So now the whole world knows about my underpants. Mrs. Harrison gave my mother a big sympathetic look. Then when I got in her ridiculously humongous SUV she said, “Madeline, why can’t you try to help your mother?”

  I watched over the top of The Song of Bernadette while my mother sat staring at all her stupid books and maps. My father never uses guidebooks. He just goes places. He explores. He has adventures. Even in the days when they were married and supposedly happy, they would argue over traveling techniques, my mother reading from a guidebook and my father ignoring her.

  “Trust me on this, Madeline,” she said suddenly, brightly, in a way that made me immediately suspicious. “You are going to love this trip. We’ll go to Italy and you can go to churches where there are saints’ actual bodies right there.”

  “Like who?” I said.

  “Saint Agatha,” my mother said.

  “Saint Agatha?”

  “Only thirteen years old and the emperor made her stand naked in public because she rejected some guy’s advances. So she’s standing there naked and miraculously her hair starts to grow. And it grows and grows until it covers her nakedness completely.”

  I considered this.

  “Well,” I said, turning back to my book. “That might be interesting.”

  What else might be interesting came to me then, too. If I went to Rome, then I could go talk to the Pope. I didn’t want to sound too excited so I said, “I’ll think about it.”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said, oh so smug, “there are so many saints in Italy. Catherine of Siena, Saint Claire, Saint Francis, Saint—”

  “I get it, okay?” I said. But I was, I admit, tingling with excitement.

  Of course, divorce changes a lot of things. For example, all of the stuff I was worried about while I prayed in church the day of the avalanche wound up happening anyway. My dad was okay, but no more ginger scones on the way to school. No more slow dancing in the kitchen. In Humanities class we learned about point of view. This is the way a writer tells a story. A point of view is very specific, and changes the way the character sees the world. Well, from my point of view my mother kept getting worse and worse. It wasn’t just the way she cried all the time, or made stupid decisions, or lost things, or even the way she stopped looking pretty. But she started to seem foolish. Her job seemed foolish. Her hair seemed foolish. The things she said seemed foolish. From my point of view, my mother was foolish.

  Once, a few months after my father moved out, I found a list she had made. She was seeing a therapist with the unbelievable name of Doctor Sane. Doctor Sane always had her do things like draw animals to represent her emotions and make memory boxes and other completely idiotic tasks. This one, written in my mother’s excellent penmanship instead of on the computer, said at the top:

  The good things in my life:

  1. The kids, of course.

  2. The house. Its wainscoting in every room. Its claw-foot tubs. The butler’s bell that still works. The only slightly chipped stained glass window in the front foyer. The maze of crooked stairs and multiple stairways that lead to each floor. The nicotiana that blooms beside the front porch and fills the evening air with its sweet smell. My bookshelf-lined office. The screened-in porch that inexplicably juts from that office, even though it’s on the second floor. The house is the kind of house I imagined myself in as a child growing up in a split ranch in Indiana. Of course, I also imagined a husband but I won’t go there.

  3. My monthly column “Food Is Fun!” in Family. My job is to create recipes that are healthy, interesting, and delicious. Nothing like creamed canned tuna on toast like my own mother used to make. Instead, I write about things like fun Asian food—cold noodles with peanut butter sauce, steamed dumplings, wilted bok choy. The kids hate this food I make for the column. They want what they call “real food”—macaroni and cheese from a box, chicken nuggets, fish sticks. Still, every Friday night, after a week of researching ideas and writing my column, we all sit down together and test my recipes. They grimace and gag and spit out my carefully rolled turkey meatballs, my tortellini with a creamy artichoke heart sauce, my delicate flan. “Kids love cream sauce,” I write later that night, after my own kids have gorged themselves on nacho cheese tortilla chips and gone to bed. “And they will take to artichoke hearts the way our generation took to SpaghettiO’s.”

  I like this column because I get to be creative, for one thing, and because I get to bring in $2500 a month, which makes me feel independent from my no-good, suddenly incredibly wealthy, married to somebody else husband. I mean ex-husband. But I won’t go there.

  4. My cookbook, Cooking for Kids Is Fun!. It sold moderately well in big cities like Boston and Los Angeles and failed miserably in places like my own home state of Indiana. The book is filled with sidebars about things like the joys of berry picking with your kids, then going home and making fresh jams and cobblers. On the back cover is a black-and-white picture of me grinning foolishly, with a somber Cody on one side of me and a scowling Madeline on the other, standing in front of our 1919 enamel Glenwood stove, looking like we were straight out of Little House on the Prairie. Did I mention that I also love that stove?

  5. (or is it 6?) Family is sending me to Italy to research authentic Italian recipes. When I get back, I get to write a feature called “Traveling With Kids Is Fun!” My editor, Jessica, a single, childless woman in her twenties, is delighted by even the moderate success of the cookbook. “I’ve got big plans for you,” Jessica said, and on my good days I imagine summers in Asia, in South America, in India. I imagine more cookbooks, a wider audience. I imagine myself as famous as that wonderful ex-husband of mine, Scott, as rich as Scott. That’s on my good days. Did I mention that I don’t like Jessica? She is fifteen years younger than I am, a real blonde, a Harvard graduate. She dates an MTV talk show host. She wears short dresses and knee-high suede boots in colors like lavender and baby blue. Jessica is a hard person to like.

  7. (or is it 6? There is no 7 (or is it 6?))

  I took that list and folded it very small, the way I folded notes in school that were not meant for just anybody to read. It proved things, this list. It proved that my mother did not like Jessica even though whenever she talked to her on the phone she gushed and said things like, “You are something else!” It proved my mother was crazy jealous of my father, just because he was brave and smart and had done something meaningful with his life, unlike her. It proved how insincere and insecure she was. How could a person like my mother keep a person like my father in love with her? If she had been different, someone more like his new wife, Ava, we would still be a family. The list proved everything.

  On the way to school the morning after our mother gave us the thrilling news about the trip to Italy, Cody made an announcement: He was afraid. He was afraid of Mount Vesuvius erupting and then burning us to death while we were in Italy. But I knew, and even our mother knew, that he was also afraid of swimming in the ocean because there could be sharks; of sailing because there could be icebergs; of sleeping alone because there were ghosts, vampires, strangers; of flying because planes crashed or, worse, disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. Cody was probably the only five-year-old kid who preferred the History Channel over Nickelodeon.

  Mom put on her most cheerful voice.

  “We probably won’t even see Mount Vesuvius, buddy,” she said, glancing into the rearview mirror at Cody, who sat stiffly smack in the middle of the backseat.

  “That’s all you see in Naples,” I said.

  “Why, thank you, Madeline, for your sudden interest in the geography of Italy,” my mother said, glaring.

  I sat beside Cody, squashed between the door and his car seat. Would he ever outgrow that stupid thing? I wondered, scowling over my Spanish vocabulary words. My father said Spanish was perhaps the single most important thing I would learn because one day soon more people would speak Spanish than any other language. My fathe
r was always right.

  “We don’t have airbags, do we?” Cody said anxiously.

  “In this old heap?” I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding!” Mom drove an embarrassing 1984 Volvo 240 with almost two hundred thousand miles on it and a huge dent on the front from the time she chased after my father once when they were fighting. She plowed right into Sophie’s parents’ new Lexus. “Now look what you’ve done,” my father said, jumping out of his own VW.

  “They didn’t even have airbags when they made this car,” I told Cody. “They weren’t even invented yet.”

  “Because airbags kill kids, right?” Cody said, looking at me.

  “Volvos are the safest cars made,” Mom said. “Did you know that?”

  “You told me a zillion times,” he said, sighing.

  “There you go,” she said, forcing a smile.

  “Miles’s mother has airbags in her car. So don’t let her ever pick me up, okay?”

  “Gotcha,” she said. “Right-o.” She took a breath.

  Miles’s mother was supposed to pick Cody up from school that very afternoon. It was written on the big calendar in the kitchen. I started to keep count of my mother’s lies. Two since we got in the car and the entire day still stretched before us. Sometimes my mother tells me that I have an unbalanced view of what has happened to our family. “There are two sides to every story, Madeline,” she likes to say. But my father doesn’t lie. In his kind of journalism, he exposes lies.

  “First grade is the hardest grade, right?” Cody said. “I’m in the hardest grade right now, right?”

  “Oh, please,” I groaned. “Do you have Spanish? Do you have to know the state capitals? All fifty of them?”

  “So,” Mom said, “about my great news. The trip? Isn’t it great? You and me and Madeline. The three of us. All together.” She looked at me in the mirror and added, “All expenses paid. By the magazine.”