Hooked (14 page)

I imagined them sitting at an outdoor café on lower Fifth Avenue, the May breeze billowing through Mom’s pretty blond hair and Mrs. Weston’s scraggly ponytail. How they’d order drinks and the Westons would wonder about Dad’s choice of plain tonic with lime, but at the same time they’d notice his quiet, distinguished demeanor and understand that whatever battles he’d had were in his past, and they would respect him for overcoming them. Dad would smile at Mr. Weston’s twinkly-eyed attempts to lighten the situation. He’d take out a legal pad to figure out our finances and Mr. Weston would make a joke about the pad, and Dad would laugh gruffly and say, “Well, I am a numbers guy.” Mrs. Weston would watch Mom in her low V-neck, black jersey wrap sweater and wonder why she didn’t try to dress like that every so often instead of in her usual baggy button-downs and jeans. She’d wonder where she could find clothes like that, stuff that was for every day but that also had a little edge. She’d be tempted to ask Mom, but decide to do it when they’d see each other again. Toward the end, they’d give each other knowing looks of resignation and talk about Will’s and my endearing, exasperating habits, like how Will comes home from school and records
basketball games that he never watches, and wastes Mr. Weston’s DVR space, or how he leaves his socks balled up under the dining room table like little cow pies, or how I leave the caps off everything—toothpaste and especially medicine bottles—and how I’m going to have to be careful about that when the baby comes. “They’re in for it,” I imagined Mom saying as they put on their coats, and I pictured them giving each other knowing looks, behind which would be little flickers of joy and anticipation for their unborn grandchild, as if he or she were already in the restaurant with them, drawing them together into an intimate football huddle.

Mom walked through the door at ten on the dot.

“Hi,” I said, rolling up from the couch.

“Were you sleeping?” she asked, undoing the belt of her coat.

“Uh-uh,” I said. “How did it go?”

She threw her coat on a chair and went to the kitchen. I heard her unlock the dishwasher and start clattering stuff onto the counter.

I followed her and sat down at the table. “So how did it go?”

“One of these days you could empty the dishwasher.”

“Sorry,” I said. “What happened?”

“We talked.” She tossed some forks into the tray, then picked up the small strainer she used to rinse berries and shook it dry.

“About?”

“Money, basically. We’re each going to give you ten thousand dollars. You’re going to keep separate bank accounts and be responsible for your own expenses. We’ll see how far that goes. I hope they hold up their end.”

“Wow, okay,” I said, feeling suddenly like a helpless child.
“Like I said, we can treat it as a loan. We’ll pay you back over time.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” she said. “You won’t exactly be employable, and Will’s parents appear to be keen on him staying in school. Daddy is also hell-bent that you keep your spot at NYU until the time is right for you to go back.” She shut the silverware drawer and turned around. “Honestly, I don’t understand this country’s obsession with education. Will should get a job, in my opinion.”

“Well, thank you,” I said, fingering the Bloomingdale’s catalog on top of the stack of mail, too embarrassed to look at her. Money had a way of doing that.

“Other than that, we discussed our disappointment that you couldn’t be persuaded,” she said. “That took a while.”

“Mom, I’m done. I’d always wonder. I know enough to know I couldn’t live with not keeping it. Can we move on now?”

“Move on. My only daughter is wrecking her life. Move on.”

“What did you think of Mrs. Weston?”

“What did I think?” She reached down to pull the plates out of the dishwasher. “What does it matter?”

“She’s sort of bug-eyed, don’t you think?” I thought about how so much of what I said came from rotten, anxious places. “She’s more with it than she comes across, but she seems a little spacey, right?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“You were just together for two hours. You didn’t notice anything?”

“Thea, don’t.” She shut the dishwasher with a neat click and dried her hands. “I know she wants more for Will, things that don’t involve this crap.” The way she drew out the word
crap
, I felt like a trampy, knocked-up cretin with big buckteeth, wearing dirty, light-blue corduroys. “I sometimes wish you could just be me for a minute so you could understand how much this stinks.”

“You know, what about just thinking about what
I
think is right for me?” I asked. “What’s meaningful to me? It is my life, after all.”

She turned around and faced me, one hand on her hip. “I forget who once said to me, ‘Children are thankless,’ but they were right. They were absolutely right.” She pulled a Toblerone bar out of the butter door of the fridge and went to her room.

“I said thank you!” I yelled after her.

The morning of graduation, the sky was a deep, sharp blue and the wind made the spouts of the Lincoln Center fountain bend in different directions like a frothy liquid compass. My purple polyester gown, striped with creases from the box, slithered against my now giant stomach. Vanessa took my hand and we skipped to the hall underneath the murals of dancers. I wished Will could have been there, but when I had asked Mom if I could invite him, she had given me a “Don’t-even-think-about-it” look.

“I have no interest in celebrating your achievements with someone who’s essentially destroyed your future,” she’d said, and I had taken that as my cue to drop the subject.

The ceremony took two and a half hours, enough time for
four hundred kids to march across the stage and get their diplomas. Afterward, Stephen Bustello, a kid in my class everyone lusted after, stood on the granite ledge of the fountain and threw his cap in, and it floated on top of a spout before falling into the bubbles. The diamond stud in his ear caught the sun and reflected little dots of light onto someone’s shoulder. I’ll probably never see him again, I thought. I pictured him flying over the city like a superhero, laughing at all of us.

My parents and I went with Vanessa’s parents and her brother, Miles, to a dark Greek restaurant with a big stone fireplace that had no fire in it because it was almost summer.

“Why there, why not someplace more fun?” Mom had asked.

“We want to go somewhere close by,” I had said. It seemed important to have lunch near the actual event.

“Lincoln Center, yuck,” she’d responded.

When Vanessa and I had graduated from junior high together, we’d had lunch at Tavern on the Green. Now when we sat down at the Greek restaurant, Vanessa’s mother passed around pictures of twelve-year-old Vanessa and me sitting in tall brocade chairs, holding up glasses with ginger ale and cherries in them. We were the only ones at the table. My hair was too long and lemon yellow, and there was a blue ribbon hanging off the side of my head. I was grinning and looking sideways at Vanessa, and she was looking into the camera, her shoulders neat and narrow, her eyes smart with secrets.

“To the girls,” Dad said. He sat across the round white table, next to Mr. March.

“To the girls,” we all repeated.

“To the graduates,” said Vanessa’s dad. “The cream of the crop.”

“All the best to both of you,” Dad said. Mom fidgeted with her gold bangle bracelets and her vodka tonic and studied the people at other tables.

“To bravery,” Vanessa’s mom said. I knew she’d never wish my situation on Vanessa, but she winked at me.

“To stupidity, more like it,” Mom muttered. No one else heard her. I slathered triangles of pita bread with olive oil and taramosalata and crumbled feta cheese, starving. The waiter brought plates of calamari and stuffed olives. Mr. March talked to Dad about how much our high school had changed since his father had gone there, when it was boys only.

“Constant brawls,” Mr. March said. “He used to say it was like Rikers, I’m not kidding.” Mr. March was skinny with a small potbelly and wore the same glasses Diane Keaton wore in
Annie Hall
. Dad chuckled politely, his index finger stretching his brow toward the ceiling. Dad injected something celebratory into the dim room. But he hardly said a word.

“I just want to lie on Thea’s dock this summer,” Vanessa said, stroking my cheek. “Kay?”

“Don’t torture me, Vanessa, please,” said Mrs. March. “We begged and borrowed to get you that thing at Nickelodeon.”

“I knowww, but I just need a li’l breaky,” she moaned.

“Breaky, I’ll show ya breaky,” Mr. March interjected, making a fist with his pudgy hand.

“What am I going to do without my Nessy around to rattle my chain?” Mrs. March mused at the menu, shaking her head. “Who’s going to give me lousy pedicures?” She looked at my mother. “The first one to go, Fiona. My heart’s about to snap.”

Mom smiled empathically at Mrs. March and then her face faded behind a cloud. I realized she wanted
me
to go. I
straightened my forks and had the weird sensation of being there in my body, sandwiched between Mom and Vanessa, but with the rest of me vaporizing out of the restaurant to a place where I existed completely alone with my thoughts and worried plans.

I celebrated the first Monday of no school by going to Stash. The cowbell clanged and the woman behind the counter looked up as I entered. I was the only one in the store.

“So I think I figured it out,” she said cheerfully, recognizing me right away. She pulled open a drawer, fished around and walked toward me with a piece of graph paper that had about twenty numbered instructions and a lot of capital-letter abbreviations. The photo of me in the bikini was paper-clipped to the top.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the letters
SC
.

“Single crochet,” she said. “Which is mostly what this is, for tightness. Have you ever worked with a pattern before?”

“Actually, no, I’ve only done a scarf. Is it hard?”

“It’s not hard,” she said, and from the way she looked at me, I knew it would be. “It’s just there are a few things you need to familiarize yourself with. If you have a minute, I could quickly go over it.”

“That would be great,” I said.

“You’re lucky—I got nothing doing at the moment,” she said. She went through the pattern abbreviations and got me
started, casting on the first side with some practice yarn from a basket by the counter.

“It’s basically a series of single crochets, joined together by chains and slip stitches,” she said.

“Slip stitch?” I asked, staring at her blankly.

“I’ll show you, don’t worry.”

“I’m glad the original was crocheted and not knitted,” I said. “I’ve tried a few times to knit and I always screw up. I have these big ambitions with knitting and I can never follow through.”

She smiled in an understanding way. “You just need someone to help you get started.” She took my hook and checked it, then handed it back. “Crochet’s a different game, maybe more fun, I sometimes think. More air. I’m a hard-core knitter, but crochet is airy. And it’s more forgiving.”

“You mean if you mess up,” I said.

“If you mess up, and the flow, I don’t know.” She mimicked winding her fingers and an imaginary needle. “I’m obsessed with it all. Sometimes I think it borders on pathological.” She sat back in the chair. “It makes everything better.”

“How long have you had Stash?” I asked, spreading out the chains so I could see them better. “I’m Thea, by the way.”

“I’m Carmen.” She smiled. “Two years. It was my husband’s idea. We were trying to get pregnant and I couldn’t stop cleaning. I would go through, like, five bottles of 409 a week. So he was like, ‘You have to stop cleaning.’ He said I should open a shop.”

“Well, it’s a great place,” I said.

“Thank you.” She looked around contentedly and checked my hook again. “Okay, you did three of those, right? Now it’s
time to connect them with a slip stitch.” She reached my hook across the three chains and pulled the yarn through. “It’s basically just a connector stitch. No biggie. There, you got it. So when is your baby due?”

“In the summer,” I said. “I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”

“Are you in school?”

“I just graduated from high school.”

“Wow,” she said. “That’s brave.”

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t know, having a baby barely out of high school.”

“Well, we didn’t exactly plan it. Our parents are still in freak-out mode.”

“Yikes,” she said. She looked at me like she wanted to ask a million questions, but instead she turned back to the pattern. “You’re doing really well. You’ll probably get stuck, make some mistakes, have some questions. Feel free to come back anytime. Come back anyway. I want to see how it turns out.”

I stood up and thanked her, a little embarrassed by how much she’d helped me. She walked me to the door and saw me off, standing on the sidewalk with her arms folded, as though she were saying goodbye from her house. I started down the street, stopping at a light to jam the pattern into my bag, not knowing where to put the photo of me in the bikini so that it wouldn’t get any more beaten up than it already was. I looked at my face in the photo; I had a sort of Mona Lisa half smile going, but even ten-plus years later, it was immediately raw and decipherable. Me and my grandmother on the beach, after breakfast—toast and milk and orange juice, in side-by-side glasses. She was keeping me out of our house after another four a.m. blow-up.

“Why in the world would I want to go to Alan’s with you?”
I remembered hearing Dad shout as I lay in bed. I’d crept to the top of the stairs and peeked. He was standing in the middle of the round woven rug, towering over Mom in a rocking chair. Then Mom stood up, my grandmother’s dark green bathrobe draping at her feet. “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it,” she’d said. “I can’t imagine why they’d want us in the first place.” She’d pretended to shake hands in the air, then turned and looked at her feet. “Uh, hi, uh-uh-uh, Alan, nice tacking out there, uh, today?” I didn’t know what she was talking about, just that she was making fun of him. I focused on the big rusty fan in the corner of the upstairs hallway, feeling the silence in every pore, its terrible, inescapable vacuum. I wondered what it would be—one of the sailing trophies on the mantel? The TV? But this time, she struck first. He spat at her and gave her the infamously cryptic title of “Shit-Hair,” and that was when she swung the storm lamp in an upward swoop, as though she were swinging a tennis racquet, slamming it at his ear. I remembered not needing to pretend to be asleep by the time the cops came, and after they left, Mom taking me upstairs to sleep in the guest room with the door locked.