You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  I HAD AN EMBARRASSING compulsion to put on makeup and take particular care with my hair and clothes when I went back to Oconomowoc. It was one thing when I lived there, running errands in my sweatpants and doing little more than wiping the shine off my bare skin before I stopped at the Kiltie for a peanut butter milkshake. But in the past two years I had become a visitor.

  I just hadn’t come home one June, having lucked into a cheap sublet on Spaight Street, and when Jill and I drove back for a weekend that summer it was clear we no longer had the same ease with our old acquaintances, or even once-close friends. When we all ran into one another at The Main Event over dollar beers, or at the fairgrounds in line to buy cheese curds, we didn’t even try to hide our appraisals: After the hug came the tilted-back head, the extraneous, contemplative nods. I felt I came up wanting in these one-offs. Some of the girls I’d been in gymnastics with, the compact muscled ones who came up to my shoulder, had gone on to compete on college teams, and I must admit that seeing them again brought out the worst in me. Just when I thought it didn’t matter to me anymore I’d seen Christie Juska at a fair, her shiny black ponytail bouncing and her muscled legs in a tense, splayed-toe stance, sipping mineral water and eschewing the bratwurst as if she never knew when she might be called upon to perform an impromptu floor exercise. Next thing I knew I was doing handsprings in the backyard, out of practice and panting, my mother tapping on the window and telling me to come in before I snapped an ankle.

  I no longer tried to renew old friendships beyond a night out, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t put on my jade choker, mascara, and a swipe of sheer blackberry lipstick when I went back in early April. No point in handing people their gossip on a platter, as Jill liked to say.

  I was going home for my mother’s forty-fifth birthday. It was already dark when I arrived, after leaving Kate’s at five. I was carrying a bottle of champagne and an expensive wool sweater, both of which she had helped me choose. It was extravagant, but Kate wouldn’t be charging me rent, so I had been enjoying the freed money since I had agreed to move in. I’d been on a bit of a spree: stocking up on new CDs to play in my car, a sweater for Jill, a new winter coat for myself. It was much more fun shopping for my mother with some money. As I browsed I had thought of all the drugstore cologne and aftershave I had bestowed upon my parents over the years, and then I grabbed a silk tie for my father as well.

  When I had gone back at Christmas the house was festooned with colored lights and wreaths—being a religious skeptic did not prevent my mother from enjoying the trappings of the holidays, including the tree which, she often noted, was really a pagan hand-me-down—but now the decorations were long gone and the snow was piled in gray heaps on either side of the door. The siding had been avocado for years, but my father had recently painted it light blue. The house was just a tiny bungalow, with a living room at the front, their bedroom and mine off to the side, and a dining room off the kitchen. The basement held my mother’s sewing machine and my father’s workbench.

  Mom had worked at the doctor’s office since I was fifteen, a job she said appealed to her organizational zeal. She took trips to Chicago every now and again, wandering around the Art Institute or visiting some library with rare manuscripts. My father accompanied her about half the time, but as far as I could tell it was not a point of contention. She seemed to like the time alone, or with a friend, and my father spent the weekend grilling steaks and doing yard work. They seemed to have reached a point in marriage at which they regarded each other’s faults with no more than a roll of the eyes, my mother’s brisk wave fanning it away.

  I’d never thought of a tactful way to ask why and how they got married. My mother had meant to go to college but somehow never did. Money was tight, she’d once told me when I was in high school, and it had all seemed impractical at the time. Besides, she’d get to it one of these days. In the meantime, she’d add, one fingertip tapping on my untouched pile of textbooks, you study.

  For a long time I assumed some sort of phantom pregnancy had precipitated their marriage, maybe a miscarriage or a scare that didn’t pan out, since I was born more than a year after their wedding. This was when I was about fourteen, around the same time most kids decide they’re adopted. My mom and dad seemed to like each other, and they rarely argued, but even to me they seemed mismatched. As a child I spent wildly divergent days with each of them, alone, every few months: a Brewers game with my father, something educational with my mother. The Brewers games, where my dad settled back comfortably in his seat, wordlessly allowing me sips of his beer, were far more fun.

  For a brief period my father and I were very close. I was eight or nine, so he would have been about thirty, the same gray eyes beneath straight brows and a lot of thick, straight nutmeg-brown hair. I’d inherited the eyes and the hair color but not, unfortunately, the straight hair. Even young, he was never one of the voluble, funny dads, or the excitable ones cheering on the sidelines during my various athletic careers. He was always watching calmly, periodically calling out some specific bit of advice to me; sipping from a thermos of coffee. I remembered a lot of weekends spent with him after the matches or games, walks downtown when my father stopped in hardware stores, examining drills and sanders while I pored over the racks of seed packets for lack of anything more colorful. But I always got a little bribe, the suggestion we not tell my mother delivered straight-faced. An ice cream cone, a vanilla Coke, a book that wasn’t educational. Later I realized my mother wasn’t bothered by these little transgressions, but at the time it both worried and pleased me to know the mischievous side of him. I suspected my mother had no idea.

  We didn’t talk a lot now, but we hadn’t conversed extensively back then, either. I went to my dad mainly with specific questions: I have rarely asked him something he couldn’t answer. I don’t know where he learned it all—carburetors, insects, electoral colleges, vegetable fertilizer, and mutual funds—but I do know he never volunteered any of the information he seemed to have picked up by osmosis and stored away. Once, last year, the Honda began to overheat as I drove back from Madison, and despite the seventy-degree day I turned on the heater and got the car home that way. When I told him this, he said mildly, “How’d you know to do that?” I realized I wasn’t sure where I’d heard it, but not from him. “It didn’t occur to me to tell you that,” he’d said. He was staking a tomato plant while we talked, kneeling in the dirt. I was looking down at the gray-blue top of his baseball hat, his fingernails ringed in dirt. “I should have, I guess,” he continued, “but you knew somehow.” Then he patted the tomato vine into place and stood up. He smiled at me, obviously proud of my quick thinking, totally oblivious to my annoyance.

  Sometimes I felt I could already see the old man he’d be in thirty years, still working methodically over the house until it was almost entirely new, planting gardens until the yard was filled with greenery, mulling over all the things he knew so thoroughly it never occurred to him to mention them to me.

  My mother must not have minded his reticence, or else she too already knew what to do when a car overheated. Who was to say they didn’t dance in the living room when I was gone? Maybe after their weekends apart my father met her with candles and music.

  My parents greeted me at the door, exclaiming over the drive and the snow. I reached up to hug my mother, realizing yet again that she was four inches taller than me and always would be. She pressed her cheek against mine. It was fuzzy and smelling of powder, with that menopausal down that I had begun to notice on her when I’d been gone for the first few months of college. She turned toward the dining room table and drew me with her. My mother was still slim and broad-hipped, her dark hair in a low ponytail streaked with white. She wore a cotton turtleneck, a sweater, and corduroys against the cold in the house. My parents were fanatical about heating bills. Heat was one thing Kate refused to stint on. I left my coat on.

  “Well, come in, have something to drink,” my mother said. My father ruffled my hair and gave me a
rough hug.

  She poured me a glass of sweet pink wine and I took a sip.

  “What’s this?” she said, smiling quizzically into the bag I had set on the table. She held up the champagne and swiveled it around, gazing at the label. “I haven’t even opened one of these bottles in years. I’m not sure I remember how.”

  “I’ll do it. You just turn the bottle and hold the cork still.”

  “Huh,” she said. She tucked it into the fridge and sat down with me. My father sat down too.

  “How’s Jill? We saw her parents at fish fry last week.”

  “She’s great,” I said. “She decided to get down on it at school and signed up for eighteen credits.”

  “Good,” my mother said with finality. “I hated to see her floundering. She’s too bright for that.”

  She hadn’t seemed to be floundering so badly to me, probably because I had been the one handing her the beer when she was supposed to study. I hung my jacket over the back of my chair.

  “Well,” my father said, “what about you? Did she inspire you to get a little more serious?”

  “Sort of,” I said. I examined the cracked skin of my hands and got up to get a squirt of moisturizer from the kitchen. “I’m still taking kind of a reduced load while Kate needs more help,” I called to them. “But the classes I have are pretty easy.” I came back in, rubbing my hands, and added, “I also branched out and took an art history course. Italian.”

  The redirect seemed to work. Mom nodded with satisfaction. “Don’t sell the book back for seventeen dollars or whatever fraction they pay,” she said, pointing at me over her glass.

  “Just take a class, Mom,” I said. “It would be a lot more helpful than just the book.”

  “One of these days,” she said. “Maybe when you’re done.” Then she crossed her legs, leaning back in her chair, and said, “When will you make up the credits, this summer?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I had been debating whether to mention this, but they seemed fairly relaxed. I went for it. “It depends. I might be taking a trip right in the middle of the schedule.”

  Their eyebrows rose in unison. “Where to?” my dad asked.

  “I don’t know quite where yet. It’s Kate’s thing. She was thinking maybe Italy. She’d have to rent a house, obviously, something without steps, and maybe bring some people.”

  My parents exchanged a look.

  “I’m going to get some water,” my father said, standing. “Becky? Marianne?” My mother and I shook our heads. He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Mom and I sat silently for a moment. “That’s really something,” she said.

  “I know.” I was nodding a little too heartily, I could feel it. I straightened up my posture and folded my hands on the table before me. “I’d never get the opportunity otherwise.”

  Something flitted across Mom’s expression and disappeared. “You can save your money, of course,” she said. “Open a separate savings account and set up an automatic deduction kind of thing.”

  “Oh, I know. But that would be like youth hostels, and backpacking. I couldn’t afford to go rent a house if Kate weren’t going.”

  My father returned, setting a big glass of ice water on the table. None of us said anything for a moment. Sensing a good moment to flee, I started to get up and put things away.

  “Bec,” my dad said. He held up a hand, palm toward me. I sat back down. “I think it’s great you’ve decided to help this woman,” he began.

  “Kate.”

  “Kate,” he agreed. “I’m glad to see you lending a hand—”

  “It’s not charity work. It’s a job.”

  “We realize that,” my mother broke in. “And I’m glad you like it. But this is supposed to be about trying something new, not abandoning school for some menial job, no matter how fun it is.”

  I took a deep breath. My mother made it sound as though I’d just come across a TV show I really liked. “I wouldn’t call it fun,” I said. “It’s not quite that . . . light.”

  She raised her eyebrows so far her whole forehead furrowed. “Okay, it’s not fun, per se, but you enjoy it. You get to do things with this woman’s money and lifestyle you might not otherwise. But you’re in college for a reason,” she pointed out. She sat back in her chair and eyed me. “Are you thinking of switching majors? To nursing, maybe?”

  For some reason this had never occurred to me. School and Kate seemed so separate, I never would have thought to overlap them. “No,” I admitted. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Don’t overreact,” she began soothingly, “but are you sure you’re just not letting yourself be taken advantage of?”

  There was a deadly silence for a moment. I became aware of the lightness of the falling snow outside the window, the music still playing faintly through the door, from my dad’s radio in the garage. Mom and Dad both observed me warily, as though I might become violent. And for a moment I would have liked to throw something, or peel out of the driveway. I’d done that once or twice in my life. It was a satisfying way to end an argument.

  But instead I made an effort to think through what I was going to say. I reached over and took a deep drink from my father’s glass of water. So this was what they’d been thinking. I took a breath, then drank some more.

  I set the empty glass back down in front of him.

  “I’m not being taken advantage of,” I informed them. My voice trembled slightly, and I concentrated on steadying it, but as soon as I began talking again it rose. “She pays well. I’m learning. You can enjoy something without getting taken advantage of, you know. Anyway, I’m learning, a lot, and I can save up more money now, and I don’t even need rent—” I was stringing words together without quite knowing where I was headed.

  “Rent?” My mother had become very still. “Is she paying your rent?”

  I folded my arms, then unfolded them. I wasn’t eloping. I didn’t need to get all defiant. Really, I’d gotten a promotion. “I’m moving in with her,” I said simply. “She needs someone at night.”

  “Well,” my father said gently, “honey, shouldn’t she have thought of that before she left her husband?”

  My brief moment of calm split open. “Oh, goddamn it. I never should have told you about that.”

  I stalked into the kitchen. As soon as I got there I stared around me and realized I had nothing to accomplish in there and no one to yell at, so I turned around and stomped back out and added in a rush, “Of course she has no say in anything and should cling to any jackass who’ll have her or even one who won’t.”

  They stared back at me, mouths slightly ajar. Mom recovered herself first.

  “Don’t oversimplify,” my mother said. “Kate has a right to make her own decisions”—a pointed glance at my father—”but you’re not responsible for the results.”

  I stood there in the doorway, glaring but unable to think of any good arguments. Their patronizing way of saying Kate’s name made me crazy. The tone when they mentioned her—and only if I had mentioned her first—was one I remembered from high school, when they invariably missed the mark as they tried to connect with me, asking me about “boys” instead of guys, how “The Rems” show had been.

  I used to see it as pitiable ignorance, but it struck me now as sly. That gentle emphasis they gave her name—as opposed to the easy way they asked after Jill—was purposeful. They knew whatever I liked or even loved was a passing thing, so fleeting they need not even treat it as a fact.

  So I hadn’t followed through on every single thing my mother had pushed me into trying. What did she want? I had tried out for the plays and taken the music lessons. For a few years I had been a talented gymnast. So what if none of that had changed my life?

  “My life is really different now,” I said. I wasn’t certain where this was going.

  “We gather,” said my father.

  “Look, I’m not trying to make things even harder for this poor woman,” my mother said.

/>   The words actually made me recoil—I found I had taken a step backward into the kitchen. She made Kate sound so downtrodden and helpless. I saw how they imagined it: a shabby house; me springing for groceries when a government check mysteriously failed to arrive; Kate slovenly, wheedling, mawkish.

  “I haven’t fallen for anything,” I said. “Jesus, I’m not an idiot!”

  I headed past them and into the living room, where my bag was still on the floor. All I could think of to do was find a task and get away for a moment before I did something to make myself look like a fool or a child. The polite and reasoned veneer of the past three years since I’d left for school had dissolved so quickly I knew it must have been only a thin shell anyway. It was so ridiculous that I laughed bitterly to myself as I threw my bag over my shoulder. My father started to speak.

  “I’m just taking it to my room,” I said, and paused, realizing I’d banished myself to my bedroom at the age of twenty-one.

  I shut my door behind me and sat down on the bed. I’d chosen a slightly ghastly shade of lavender paint in sixth grade, evoking a sort of sprigged-cotton, stale-cookies-and-tea atmosphere. The carpet in the corner near the window still bore a stained triangle from a shelving unit that had held a bunch of knickknacks—tiny glass rabbits, unicorns, and the occasional kitten—and trophies. They were probably in a box in the basement, unless Mom had thrown them out.

  I lay back against the headboard, hands crossed over my belly, and breathed deeply. This was not a calming room. It was sluggish, the embarrassment of my own bad taste acted like a weight on my diaphragm, and I could still feel my heart pumping too fast, my face hot.

  I pulled a pillow from beneath my head and put it over my eyes. It smelled faintly of bleach. What had I hoped to accomplish in telling them? I should simply have given them a new phone number and said I’d moved. They didn’t have to know if I was gone for a few weeks over the summer, whether I was sweating in front of a fan or off sipping champagne and checking my travel bag for passports. I didn’t really have to tell them a thing, but I’d wanted to talk about it. I was proud of myself.