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

by Ann Hood

  “Yes,” Antoinetta said too quickly. “He would.”

  I practically groaned out loud. Antoinetta still thought her father and my mother might get together, even after I explained I could never do that to her or her father.

  Luckily, he refused to come in. He didn’t like to go into other people’s houses. He actually said that to my mother.

  Even with my sore feet and bad rehearsal, having Antoinetta for a whole night made me the happiest I had felt in a long time. My mother was asking us questions about beverages and dinner and renting movies, but we didn’t stop to answer. Instead, I grabbed on to Antoinetta’s arm and pulled her upstairs.

  Antoinetta brought her book, The Lives of the Saints, and we took turns reading about different ones and acting out the best parts of their lives: getting our eyes plucked out, burning to death, helping lepers. Being a saint was exhausting.

  “You know,” Antoinetta whispered after we got in bed and turned off the lights, “I might become a nun.”

  I frowned. “You can’t get married or anything,” I said.

  “You marry Jesus,” she said, shocked at my stupidity. “You wear a wedding dress and everything.”

  “But you don’t get to kiss anybody,” I said.

  “You get to be Jesus’s bride,” she said. Her voice had turned cold. “That’s better than kissing anything.”

  “Okay,” I said, suddenly bored and sleepy.

  “Boys smell bad. Like dirty socks,” she said. “Jesus is clean and pure.”

  When I didn’t answer her she rolled away from me. But what could I say? I wanted to skip the nun part and go straight to saint; that was a fact. Along the way I might want to kiss a boy, a real boy, smelly or not.

  “You’d be a good nun,” I said finally.

  She didn’t answer but somehow I knew she wasn’t asleep.

  “Really,” I said. “You would be a great nun.”

  She rolled over again, toward me so that we were face-to-face. When she talked, I could smell the pepperoni from the pizza we’d had for dinner on her breath.

  “I might be an airline stewardess instead,” she whispered. “Then I would marry a pilot and live in Chicago.”

  I mumbled something. My toes ached in a way that I liked.

  “You know Joseph Copertino?” Antoinetta said. Clearly, she had not been dancing ballet all day or she would just be quiet and go to sleep.

  “Is he from church?” I asked her.

  Antoinetta laughed. “No, silly. He’s the patron saint of air travel. Ever since he was a kid, he had these ecstasies. Yelling, beating, pinching, burning, piercing with needles—none of this would bring him out of them. But he would return to the world when he heard the voice of his boss.” She yawned. “He would often levitate and float, so he became the patron saint of air travel.” She rolled over. “Mmmmm,” she said. “Hmhmhmhm.”

  I guessed those were falling asleep noises. But now I was wide awake. Floating! Levitating! I lay there, concentrating really hard on getting my body to lift up from the bed. But I just stayed there, earthbound, until I finally gave up and went to sleep.

  The next day, Cody was going to Henrietta Plotz’s birthday pool party at her house. She had a pizza shaped like a dinosaur and a karaoke machine. That was all fine for Cody, but why I had to go was beyond me. I didn’t even care that they had an indoor pool.

  “Bianca got to ask one person her age and she picked you,” my mother explained, talking like this was a good thing for me.

  Henrietta’s sister Bianca was so dull and so unliked that the fact that she had picked me made me certain that the L on my forehead was getting bigger every day.

  “Besides,” my mother said, “saints are into sacrifice, aren’t they? You should feel grateful for the opportunity to give up an afternoon this way.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said. But she had a point.

  That’s how I ended up at a six-year-old’s party, sitting on the side of the pool with Bianca Plotz looking at the younger kids splashing around. I could see my mother, sitting with the other mothers, in her pants with the drawstring waist and her toenails painted baby blue and only the top of her black bathing suit. She was telling them how my father did not want her to take us away so far for so long.

  “He’s being a jerk,” she said.

  Cody floated on his back. It was all he could do. Everyone else graduated in swimming class, from Pike to Eel to Minnow, and Cody remained behind, unable to put his face in the water, to blow bubbles, or to kick his feet and move his arms together in a way that would move him forward. He stayed in Pike. He floated.

  Cody always wanted to get me on his side about the divorce, which meant that he wanted me to blame Dad for everything. Just that morning he said, “Would you feel really horrible if Ava Pomme died?” Cody always said Ava Pomme like they were two parts of one word: powder puff, coffee cake, Ava Pomme.

  “Of course I’d feel bad!” I said. “And so would you.”

  “But if she died,” he said, “then Dad would come home.”

  As dumb as that was, even I considered the possibility.

  “I don’t like her,” Cody whispered, all sad and guilty.

  He made a list of all the things he didn’t like about her and decided to recite it to me right then, for about the millionth time. This was a trick he’d picked up from our mother, who had picked it up from her therapist.

  “Her tarts,” he told me.

  “Her tarts,” I reminded him, “are famous.”

  “I only like Pop-Tarts,” Cody said. Then he imitated Ava Pomme’s horrified voice: “Surely your mother doesn’t give you those?”

  “Pop-Tarts,” I said, jumping to Ava’s defense, “are totally revolting.”

  “Her clothes,” Cody continued. “They’re black. All of them.”

  I sighed. “Of course they’re black. That’s sophisticated.” Our mother’s wardrobe of various types of khaki trousers—capri, flat front, side zipper, loose fit—floated through my mind.

  “The noisy elevator that goes to her apartment,” he said.

  “Cody,” I reminded him, “it goes to their apartment.”

  “It’s for deliveries,” he practically shouted. “I hate that sliding grate that you have to close after you already closed the door. Then it goes up so slow, and it makes that noise that sounds like at any minute it will break and everyone in it—you and me and stupid Ava Pomme—will smash to death.”

  Twice Cody had hyperventilated in that elevator, forcing Ava Pomme to stick his head in a bag of tomatoes one time and a bag of sourdough bread the other time. When he caught his breath, he threw up: once in the elevator and once on Ava’s black shoes.

  “That baby,” Cody said. “Zoe.”

  I frowned.

  “Kiss your baby sister,” Cody said in his Ava Pomme voice.

  Zoe didn’t seem real to me. She didn’t do much of anything except get carried around and look cute. When I was a baby, my father used to carry me on his back in a big forest green backpack. I had pictures of that, with my parents standing together on a beach somewhere and my own baby face grinning out over my father’s shoulder. I loved those pictures. No Cody. No Ava Pomme. No Zoe. Just a family.

  The idea that Zoe would one day turn into a person, someone to contend with, made me nervous. I didn’t like to think about it.

  I hated divorce. It should be illegal or something. All it did was cause problems for everybody. Sometimes I felt like I was getting pecked apart by crows, pieces of me scattered from here to New York. I wished I was still whole, the way I had been before my mother messed up everything.

  One time, right after Baby Zoe was born and I was feeling about as low as I ever had, my mother came in my bedroom and found me crying. When she walked in, I put a pillow over my face so she couldn’t see me all red and blotchy and sad. She sat on the bed, took the pillow away, and put her cool hand on my forehead, the way she used to when I was little and felt sick to my stomach. “I know, I know,” she kept
saying, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know that I thought everything was her fault. She didn’t know how it felt to have your father leave and marry some other woman and then have a new baby.

  So I told her. I sat up and let the pillow drop to the floor and shook her hand off my forehead and said, “It didn’t have to be like this! Why do you go and mess everything up?” She looked shocked. “How did I mess everything up?” Mom asked me. “By being so ordinary,” I told her. Then she started to cry, too. She said, “Oh, Madeline.” In a movie, we would have cried together, in each other’s arms. But this was real life. Mom got up slowly and shook her head and walked out of the room, and I was left alone to think about everything, which now included not just divorced parents and a stepmother, but also a baby sister.

  Here she was now, casting a shadow over me.

  “Time to go,” Mom said, still in her bathing suit.

  “Fine,” I said. Three hours at this stupid kid party and boring Bianca had hardly said a word. She was traumatized because she was going to sleepover camp next week and she had never been away from her parents. How lame is that? She should try never ever getting to spend real days with her father. She should try having everything good being stuck in a photograph instead of part of her real life.

  “Bye, Bianca,” I said.

  “Are you going to write me at camp?” she said desperately.

  What would I ever write to her? “Gee,” I said.

  “Of course she will,” my mother said. “She’ll send you postcards from Italy.”

  My mother and I stood for a minute, side by side, watching Cody float.

  “I am not going to write her at camp,” I said.

  “She’s lonely,” my mother said, her eyes fixed on Cody. “You have no idea what loneliness feels like.”

  “Here we go again,” I mumbled.

  “Hey, buddy,” my mother called to Cody. “Let’s go.”

  Slowly, he floated to the edge of the pool, near the ladder. She held out the big blue-and-red striped towel that had his name printed in the middle in bright yellow letters. She was smiling, her arms outstretched.

  Cody ran into the towel, into her arms.

  “I can’t wait to go to Italy,” he said.

  Our mother looked startled. “Good,” she said. Then she nodded. “Good,” she said again, as if she had just won something.

  How could he give in like that? Secretly I had been imagining meeting the Pope, praying to saints, going to all the churches. But I had not let my mother know that, of course.

  Cody and I never liked the Friday night dinners our mother made us eat. This Friday was even worse: The Boyfriend was joining us. Cody sat at the kitchen counter, watching her cook, sullen. I sat at the table trying to move a glass of water across it using telepathy. Too much distraction, I thought. Too many bad vibrations.

  Our mother said, “Is there anything in the world as lovely as the smell of fresh basil?”

  We weren’t expected to answer. Our mother had asked what was called a rhetorical question. But Cody said, “Peanut butter.”

  “Peanut butter smells as good as basil?” she shrieked. “Oh, that’s a good one.”

  I rolled my eyes at Cody. We didn’t agree on many things. But we both agreed that Friday night dinners were awful. We also agreed that our mother should not have a boyfriend. Especially this boyfriend. Things were already weird enough in our life.

  She put a bowl of celery sticks on the table. I bit into one right away and spit it out. A trick! Instead of celery this tasted like licorice without the good candy part.

  “Fennel,” my sadistic mother said, smiling. “Isn’t it an interesting celery substitute?”

  “No,” I said, just as sweetly. “It’s disgusting and repulsive.”

  I knew she didn’t care. She would write in her column how much we’d loved it and then other unsuspecting mothers would give fennel sticks to their children. She would write something like, “They’ll be delighted at the surprise taste of licorice instead of the blandness of celery.”

  She was humming, not really paying attention to my misery.

  “What time is The Boyfriend getting here?” I muttered.

  My mother narrowed her eyes at me. “Why do you work so hard at being unpleasant?” she said.

  What I worked hard at was being pleasant, but I didn’t say anything. I just stripped the long threads from the stalks of fennel.

  “If I were a sculptor,” Cody said, “I would make things out of metal so they couldn’t break. What good is making things that no one can touch?”

  “No one can touch the Sistine Chapel,” Mom said. “Does that mean Michelangelo shouldn’t have painted it?”

  Cody frowned. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

  The doorbell rang and she tousled Cody’s hair on her way to answer it. “You’ll see it in Rome,” she said.

  “It’s a ceiling,” I told him. “A famous ceiling.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cody said.

  Mom turned toward us, her face all desperate, and she said, “You know, your father is soooo happy with his new family and his new life as a celebrity. Am I asking too much to want a little happiness of my own? Am I?”

  We just stared at her, surprised and blank-faced. She stared back and I wondered if she was going to cry. But then the doorbell rang again and she scurried off.

  We could hear her laughing her new laugh, the one she’d acquired around men lately, full of fakeness and flirtiness.

  “Why would anyone waste their time painting a ceiling?” Cody asked me. “How do you even do it?”

  I put out bread for a sandwich, inhaling the familiar smell of Wonder Bread. Then I smeared on peanut butter and grape jelly and handed it to Cody.

  “Doesn’t the paint drip on your face?” Cody was saying.

  “He did it on his back,” I said patiently.

  Cody’s eyes widened. “Wasn’t he afraid he would fall?”

  “No, he was on scaffolding.”

  Cody looked all confused, but I didn’t know how to describe what scaffolding was so I just said, “It’s a beautiful, famous ceiling. You’ll see.”

  Then I made my way past my mother and The Boyfriend, heading for the door.

  “Hey!” my mother said. “We have polenta.”

  “Enjoy it,” I said. “I’m going next door to Sophie’s.”

  Being at Sophie’s was like being in a museum: all fancy and quiet. The rooms were all painted colors that made me feel calm; the floors had intricate patterns made with wood. The kitchen had two of everything—two stoves, two refrigerators, two dishwashers—and cupboards that reached the ceiling. Those cupboards had glass doors so that I could see all of the food Sophie’s parents kept on hand. Crackers and chutney and fat pretzels, Little School Boy cookies and Mint Milanos, three different kinds of salsa and smoked almonds. On and on it went. At home there was yogurt and granola bars and bags of dried fruit and trail mix bought in bulk from the natural food store.

  Sophie was probably the busiest person on the planet next to Mai Mai Fan. She played field hockey and she took clarinet lessons and horseback riding lessons and a million other lessons. A ballerina has to be focused. A saint has to sacrifice. In other words, I had my hands full, too, just in a different way. Also, my mother believed that kids should not lead overly organized lives.

  Sometimes I pointed out that Sophie’s mother hired someone to keep her organized and drive her from one thing to another, but of course that only opened the door for my mother’s ranting about money and my father and how unfair life is.

  “I can’t afford an outrageously expensive loft in Tribeca, can I?” she liked to ask me. A rhetorical question.

  Sophie’s parents were at a play in Boston and wouldn’t be home until late. Tonight, Sophie’s older sister Emma was in charge, which meant she would sit upstairs on the third floor in her room and read. Emma was an overachiever. She wanted to read one hundred books this summer—an admirable goal, I thought.
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  “I’ve got a surprise for you upstairs,” Sophie said. “Grab some Snapple.”

  I opened one of the giant refrigerators. A half-eaten turkey stared back at me.

  “Not that one,” Sophie laughed. “In the beverage one.”

  I went to the other refrigerator and swung its heavy door open. Top to bottom drinks: beer and seltzer and fancy root beer and all kinds of milk: skim, 2%, and whole. At my house we only drank skim milk and water from the tap. Finally I found the Snapple and grabbed a bottle.

  “Come on,” Sophie said, her hands full of snacks for us.

  I walked through the double parlors, with the furniture that begged you to sit on it, then into the foyer—foy-ay, Sophie called it—and up the big front staircase to the second floor and Sophie’s room. Sophie stacked all the food on a table and plopped onto her bed, which looked like a giant sleigh. I plopped next to her, imagining for a moment that we were in Russia, long-ago Russia when they still had a czar and people wore tall fur hats and ermine cloaks, and I imagined we were in a real sleigh, gliding across miles and miles of snow. I sighed. If I didn’t already have so many more important things to wish for, I would want to be Russian.

  “Ready?” Sophie said.

  I glanced over at her. Tonight she had on a lime green headband with one yellow stripe in the middle and small earrings shaped like seashells. My mother would not let me get my ears pierced until I was sixteen. She did not believe girls should think about things like earrings until they got older. I sighed again. I didn’t really like Sophie, but being near her always made me long for every single thing I could not have.

  “If it’s smoking I’ve already tried it,” I said. “In New York with this girl named Lola who already has her belly button pierced and she’s only twelve.” I tried to sound nonchalant but it was hard. Smoking in New York City on a roof was too cool. Lola was too cool. So cool, in fact, that I was actually afraid of her. She lived in the loft above my father’s with just her mother, a performance artist. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it sounded very dramatic.

  “This is better,” Sophie said.