Goodbye To All That (22 page)

Every time Abbie uttered the word
cool
, Jill wanted to scream. Didn’t Abbie understand that they were supposed to be nudging Jill’s parents back together again? Telling her grandmother her new residence was cool was not the way to get her grandmother to consider moving back home.

Jill’s mother asked Jill and Abbie to carry the tiny table from the corner of the kitchen into the living room so three chairs could be placed around it. While Jill set the table, her mother led Abbie to the window and pointed out the First-Rate store where she worked. “It’s a nice little shopping area, and I can walk. Think of all the gasoline I’m saving by walking to work.”

She might save even more gasoline if she didn’t work at all, but Jill didn’t say that. She couldn’t, not while Abbie was babbling about how ecologically enlightened her grandmother was.

“And I get home so quickly, I can even host a dinner party after work,” Jill’s mother continued, abandoning Abbie by the window and returning to the kitchen. “I’ll slice up the meat. Do we have room on the table for a candle?”

“Ooh, candlelight,” Abbie murmured.

Jill shook her head. “There’s barely room for three plates,” she said.

“Oh, well. We can pretend a candle,” her mother said. “Jill, there’s a salad in the fridge. And I bought some pretty glasses—” she motioned toward a cabinet with her chin; her hot-mitted hands were busy pulling the roast from the oven “—so we can drink grape juice and pretend it’s wine.”

Grape juice was not Diet Coke. Jill was finding it harder and harder to hide her displeasure.

Within a few minutes, they were all seated around the table. Crowded around it, actually. The serving platters had to remain on the kitchen counter since, as Jill had observed, three dinner plates pretty much filled the table. The cheap stemware glasses looked festive, even if Jill had to force herself to drink the grape juice. It reminded her of all those seders when she was little and the children weren’t allowed to drink wine. She’d never understood why not. The kosher wine her mother used to serve at Passover tasted like cough syrup, and Jill and her siblings wouldn’t have consumed enough to get drunk.

But this was girls’ night at Ruth Bendel’s cool apartment, and since Abbie had miraculously transformed from a whiny brat to a good sport, Jill had to be a good sport, too. She had to sit placidly, eating her pot roast—which was as delicious as always; evidently the tiny kitchen hadn’t cramped her mother’s culinary ability—while her mother described her job to Abbie.

“They’re training me how to run the photograph machine,” she boasted. “Not that I’ll work there very often. They’ve got these two ladies who basically run the photography department, and one of them is pretty bitchy, pardon my language. But my boss likes everyone to know the basics, in case someone is out sick or there’s a big line or something. Everybody has digital cameras nowadays. It’s not like film and negatives. Just pushing buttons on computers. Not that I’m a computer whiz like my brilliant grandchildren, but I can push buttons.”

I’m a computer whiz, too
, Jill wanted to declare. She, after all, was running a career from her kitchen computer, if you could call writing enticingly about raisin-and persimmon-hued bra-and-panty sets for Velvet Moon’s catalogue a career.

“So, how’s school?” Jill’s mother asked Abbie. “What are you learning these days?”

Abbie grinned and shrugged. “Nothing.”

“You’re in honors pre-algebra,” Jill reminded her.

“Yeah. I’m learning pre-algebra,” Abbie told her grandmother. “My soccer team is four-two so far this season. I’m one of the top scorers
 . . .
” And on she babbled, about soccer and Toby Klotzenberg’s bar mitzvah—“in downtown Boston, at the Westin? He invited the whole seventh grade!”—and how if it were up to him, Noah would shower only once a month, he was such a pig.

It wasn’t until dessert—do-it-yourself sundaes that were delicious, but Jill would have been better off, for a lot of reasons, with a Diet Coke—that Abbie raised the subject of her grandparents’ separation.

“Are you pissed at Grandpa?” she asked, then apologized and said, “I mean, are you angry at him?”

“Angry? No,” Jill’s mother said as she dug into her heaping bowl of butter-pecan ice-cream drowning in chocolate syrup, M&M’s and a lopsided dollop of canned whipped cream.

Abbie swallowed a spoonful of M&M-flecked chocolate ice-cream. “Well, you’re like divorcing him, right?”

“We’re separated right now. Where we go from here, who knows?”

“But it’s like, what did he do? He showers every day. He has to, he’s a doctor.”

“A very good doctor,” Jill’s mother said. “The thing is, at different times in your life you need different things. Look at your mother.” Abbie obediently turned her gaze to Jill, who didn’t want to be looked at. She hadn’t volunteered to be Exhibit A for her mother’s lecture on good doctors and failed marriages. “When she was your age, she had needs like yours.”

Jill shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “I’m not sure—”

“She wanted to be pretty, she wanted boyfriends, she wanted to go to Paris, she wanted a bosom
 . . .
”

“Mom.” Jill took a slug of grape juice and wished with all her heart it was something else.

“I didn’t know you wanted to go to Paris,” Abbie said.

Jill dismissed that old fantasy with a shrug. “I thought it would be exotic. And romantic. And the food would be great.”

“So why didn’t you go?”

“I was twelve years old,” Jill replied.

“I mean later. When you were older.”

“When I was older
 . . .
” She sighed. She’d become Exhibit A, after all. “When I was older, I went to college. Then I met your dad, and we got married and had children, which seemed more important than Paris. I’ll go someday,” she insisted, because Abbie looked so sad for her.

“Exactly,” her mother chimed in. “When she reaches a different time in her life, she’ll go.”

“With Dad?” Abbie asked.

“Of course with Dad,” Jill said, hoping to reassure her daughter that she and Gordon would never do to Abbie what Jill’s parents were doing to her.

“What if Dad doesn’t want to go?” Abbie pressed her. “He always says insulting things about French people. He calls them frogs.”

“He’s joking,” Jill said, even though when Gordon went on one of his anti-France tears, he seemed pretty serious.

“When I grow up,” Abbie said thoughtfully, “I’ll get married and have kids and have a fantastic job that pays a lot, but I think I want to go to France by myself. I think you should go by yourself, too, Mom. You don’t want Dad there making stupid jokes.”

Jill busied herself with her sundae, which was melting into thick, multicolored soup. She stirred the syrup into the liquefying ice cream, turning everything the same blah brown color as the carpet.

To go to France alone
 . . .
what a scary thought. What an exhilarating idea. What if she never did it? What if she dropped everything and did it tomorrow?

She couldn’t, of course. Abbie’s bat mitzvah was just months away, and now that the Old Rockford Inn was ripping her off for an extra three bucks a guest, she couldn’t afford a jaunt to Europe. And once Abbie’s bat mitzvah was over, she and Gordon would have to start saving for Noah’s bar mitzvah.

What had her mother said? At different times in your life you need different things.

She didn’t need France. She certainly didn’t need an ugly little apartment overlooking a major roadway and a strip mall.

Time alone, though? Did she need that?

Don’t even think about it.

NOAH WAS ALREADY IN BED when Jill and Abbie arrived home around ten. “It’s a school night,” Jill reminded Abbie as they entered the house. “I didn’t mean to keep you out this late.”

“Wow, like it’s
so
late,” Abbie argued with the requisite eye-rolling and lip-curling.

Jill didn’t take Abbie’s sarcasm personally. Of course Abbie would be more affectionate with her grandmother and more snide with her mother. A Good Mom accepted the mood swings of an adolescent daughter without fussing, and she understood that it was her job to be the prime target for whatever snarkiness her daughter chose to spew. She’d spewed her own share of snarkiness at her mother when she’d been Abbie’s age.

Gordon greeted them as they entered the kitchen through the garage door. “Daddy!” Abbie hollered loud enough to wake Noah up, except for the fact that nothing short of a seven-on-the-Richter-Scale earthquake could wake him up once he was asleep. The alarm on his clock was pitched about as shrilly as a police siren—and even then, he sometimes slept through it.

Abbie wrapped her father in a big embrace, and Jill, still in Good Mom mode, refused to resent the fact that Abbie hugged her father and her grandmother a lot more exuberantly than she hugged her mother, on those rare occasions when she deigned to hug her mother at all.

“So, how’s Grandma’s new apartment?” Gordon asked. His hair was tousled, his eyes glazed as if he’d been watching too much TV. The kitchen smelled of olive oil and oregano, and a square, grease-stained pizza box sat on the counter beside the sink. Evidently, discarding the box hadn’t been on his or Noah’s to-do list. Nor, for that matter, had wrapping the two leftover slices that remained inside the box, the cheese congealed and the circles of pepperoni starting to shrivel.

Abbie babbled about the apartment, answering all Gordon’s questions—as if he actually cared what color the bathroom was or whether Grandma had hung any paintings on the walls. He just wanted to keep Abbie talking, to enjoy a few minutes of happy chatter with his princess before she headed upstairs and vanished into her bedroom to text Caitlin.

Jill lifted Abbie’s jacket from the chair where she’d tossed it and hung it and her own jacket up in the coat closet. Then she returned to the kitchen. Still immersed in conversation, Gordon had steered Abbie out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Their voices drifted down the hall to Jill, growing fainter.

She wrapped the leftover pizza and stashed it in the refrigerator, then pulled a can of Diet Coke from the door shelf and snapped it open. A cola-scented wisp of mist rose from the opening and she took a few sweet swigs. By the time she lowered the can, Gordon and Abbie were out of earshot.

She gazed around her. She’d never considered her kitchen huge, but compared to her mother’s kitchen it was monstrous. All those work surfaces, those cabinets, the full-size appliances, the table and chairs. The windows, now dark but usually filling the room with natural light. The counter-top desk with her computer humming and the screensaver spitting stars at her like the opening moments of the original Star Trek TV show, when William Shatner ponderously intoned, “Space, the Final Frontier.” Gordon had Trekkie tendencies. Jill had watched a lot of those old episodes with him over the years.

She watched his shows. She put away his leftover pizza and flattened the empty box for the paper recycling bin. She sponged off the counters, which were speckled with crust crumbs, and moved his and Noah’s dirty dishes from the sink to the dishwasher.

She swore to herself that she wasn’t turning into her mother. It was just that she hadn’t been home when the guys had been feasting on their pizza, and now it was late—too late to nag Gordon about leaving the kitchen a mess, too late to get angry and resentful about having to clean up that mess.

She absolutely wasn’t her mother. Look at the computer. She hit a key to kill the screensaver, and the bra and panty text she’d composed earlier that day for Velvet Moon shivered to life on the screen.

See? She had a job. A real job, more creative than running a cash register at First-Rate. Her mother was probably earning minimum wage, whereas Jill
 . . .
well, she didn’t want to calculate her earnings per hour, and her compensation didn’t include benefits, but still. She got to write things. She got to come up with new, edible names for colors, and she could drink Diet Coke while she worked, which she really did have to cut back on, but
 . . .

France
. Imagine being alone in France rather than alone in her kitchen.

The sting of her drink’s carbonation caused her eyes to water and she closed them, which liberated her imagination to conjure a stereotypical Parisian scene. A café beside the Seine. A glass of wine and a plate of cheese and fruit and crusty bread. Cute, skinny men in berets. Gorgeous, skinny women in haute couture. Edith Piaf’s nasal voice wafting into the air, accompanied by tinkly accordion music. The vision was pathetically clichéd and corny, but Jill reveled in it. No eye-rolling, lip-curling daughter; no rowdy, rambunctious son. No husband. No pizza crust crumbs and dirty dishes.

Just France.

Gordon’s hands alighted on her shoulders and she flinched and blinked herself back to the kitchen. “Seems like someone had fun tonight,” he said.

“Yeah.” Jill took another gulp of soda—nothing like an icy can of Diet Coke to jolt a person back to reality. “She whined the whole drive over there, then freaked out about how wonderful my mother’s place was.”

“Was it wonderful?”

“No. It’s tiny and ugly.”

“But your mother’s happy there.”

“At the moment.”

She shook free of Gordon’s hands and turned to face him. She didn’t really want to go to France without him. He was still tall and handsome and had that crooked smile she’d fallen in love with the first time she’d seen him, when she’d been an undergraduate and he’d been in his first year of Brandeis’s MAT program. She’d just settled at an empty table in the student center with a sandwich and a Diet Coke—her addiction dated back many years—and Sarah Levine’s battered copy of
The Awakening
, which Sarah had already marked up with highlighter and marginal comments, sparing Jill the need to do so since she had the same prof for post-Civil War American Lit that Sarah had had the previous year. And then Gordon had dropped onto the empty chair across from her, set his sandwich and coffee down on the table and said, “You are far and away the most beautiful girl in this building, so I hope you don’t mind my sitting here.”