On the Rocks (14 page)

“Count on it,” I replied as he sauntered away, his shoulder blades poking through the back of his dark green T-shirt. I felt myself smile for a second. If nothing else, Bobby was amusing, and there was nothing wrong with that. Especially these days.

Chapter 9

The Bitch Stole My Snack Pack

M
Y MOTHER WAS
homecoming queen of her high school. I know this because she tells anyone who will listen. Even the checkout girl at the grocery store knows she was the head cheerleader, the most beautiful girl in town, and the one voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” She was undeniably pretty and knew it—she used it to manipulate everyone around her into giving her what she wanted. One thing she was not voted was “Most Likely to Get Knocked Up by Her Boyfriend Senior Year of College.” She married my father and had me a few months later, her twenty-two-year-old waist suddenly a distant memory, just like full nights of sleep and her dreams of being a newscaster and making her own money. Unlike most babies, I didn’t come into this world as a joyous monument to my mother’s future. I came into it as the reason for the sudden destruction of her past. A past she was by no means ready to let go of.

I was seven and my sister just five when my mother’s unflinching vanity and immaturity finally became too much for my father to take, but I knew something was wrong long before that. I didn’t have a difficult childhood, but I remember there being tension and sitting at the dinner table with no one speaking. I remember my father reading the newspaper and my mother microwaving Lean Cuisines, two people in the same room but in entirely different worlds. Some kids have memories of their parents fighting, of things breaking, of arguments so volatile the neighbors could hear them. I don’t remember that. I remember silence. I remember my parents not even caring enough about each other to yell. I remember my mother being very good at pretending everything was fine. I think she’s been pretending ever since.

Oddly enough, the yearbook didn’t have a “Most Likely to Be Divorced with Two Kids by Thirty” either. Go figure.

After my dad left, she fixated on making him wish he’d never left her and proving that she was still the fairest in the land. After all, she was the envy of every girl in town when she was growing up, and she’d be damned if she was going to let him take that away from her. She became even more obsessed with her appearance, and more important, with ours, turning Katie and me into miniature versions of herself. She dressed us to the nines every time we left the house, always in smocked dresses, patterned hair bows, and patent-leather shoes. At home, we ate nothing but frozen diet meals and were forced to watch her do her aerobics video every afternoon before we could put on our cartoons. One year for show-and-tell, having already absorbed my mother’s lessons on what was truly important in life, Katie dropped to the floor to show her classmates how to tighten your tush with Jane Fonda’s leg lifts. Another time I made the silly mistake of taking a snack from one of the car-pool moms after soccer practice. My mother took one look at me, pudding cup in hand, and recoiled as if I were holding some kind of poisonous insect. She grabbed it from me and said, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” as she threw it in the garbage. I was ten. I didn’t have hips, and I didn’t care. All I knew was that the bitch stole my snack pack.

Our relationship only went south from there.

When I was in high school, I came home from school one day and caught her trying to squeeze into my prom dress, somehow convinced that it was appropriate for a thirty-eight-year-old woman to wear her teenage daughter’s dress. For a few minutes I was worried that she was going to try to steal my date. Not exactly the kind of problems normal mothers and daughters have. All I wanted was for her to drive a minivan and watch
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
at night like everyone else’s mom. I didn’t want to worry about running into her at a keg party. It became very clear that she was never going to give me the kind of sage advice girls rely on their mothers for, unless you consider knowing that women over the age of forty are more likely to be hit by a meteorite than get married useful or accurate information for a teenager to have. It’s not like my mother was asking the mirror every night if she was prettier than I was, but I felt like she was competing with me, that she envied me my youth and resented me for unintentionally taking her own. She might not have been a stepmother, but I’d seen enough Disney movies to know I’d be wise to be wary of her. Let’s just say that if my mother handed me an apple, I’d think twice before I bit into it.

As an adult, I stopped thinking that my mother was born without the maternal gene that incited most women to bake cookies and read stories and do all the things that my mother could never do, and I accepted the truth. She never recovered from the humiliation of being dumped, and she let it morph her into a different person, one who clung to the past and the dreams she had before real life got in the way. We all fear turning into our mothers as we get older, but I wasn’t just afraid, I was terrified. Over the years her narcissism had taken on a life of its own, and like any good fungus left unchecked, it had spread until it infected and ultimately destroyed everything in reach, including our relationship. I was worried that my premarital catastrophe would somehow result in my becoming like her. I knew it wouldn’t manifest itself in quite the same way, as evidenced by the fact that I wasn’t averse to chewing food as of yet, but the parallels were there. Fine, I’d never steal my kid’s snack pack, but I was beginning to understand her, just a little, and I realized it was time for a very serious reality check.

The following week I waited for my aunt in one of the dining rooms at Castle Hill, a mansion on the bluffs that had been converted into an expensive hotel. I sat at a small table by the window overlooking the water and listened to the sounds of silverware clinking on china plates, diners engaged in pleasant conversations, and, eventually, the swish of my aunt’s dress as she approached. She was a slight woman, only five-one, but she had an enormous personality and, more important, a healthy attitude about life. Her dark hair was swept back off her face, her dress was cinched snugly around her waist with a wide leather belt, and a scarf was draped around her shoulders. Aunt Patrice was everything my mother was not, and she had served as a surrogate mother for me for as long as I could remember. When my father passed away when I was in fourth grade, her husband, my uncle Mac, stepped in to fill the void, and now the two of them were basically my parents. They weren’t able to have kids of their own, and I know it was hard for both of them, because they were naturals as parents. Instead, they became the best aunt and uncle a girl could ever ask for, and my aunt had taken over as the main role model in my life, always guiding me with her wisdom, humor, and love. I imagined that was what a normal mother would do, one who wasn’t too busy telling a prepubescent child to worry about her hips or informing her that carrots have a deceptively high sugar content.

Aunt Patrice hugged me and planted a kiss on my cheek before taking a seat across from me. “So, let’s save the pleasantries for later. What happened? Are you and your mother at it again?” she asked as she removed her scarf and hung it over the back of the chair.

I mindlessly traced circles on the tablecloth with my finger. “Not really. It’s just more of the same stuff, you know? More of Mom being Mom.”

“Your mother simply being your mother wouldn’t have spurred you to text me, and certainly wouldn’t have brought me down here for lunch. Did something happen? No one knows your mother better than I do. Whatever it is, I’ll understand.”

I grabbed the ends of my hair and twisted them, trying to quell my brimming tears. I was used to my mother’s incapacity to love me the way a normal mother would. That wasn’t what was bothering me. What was bothering me was my realization that history might be repeating itself.

I folded my hands in front of me as I spoke. “I’m so scared of becoming her, you know? I’ve spent my whole life trying not to be her, and all of a sudden I find myself being bitter and angry and skeptical of men and of life in general. What if I end up like her? Thinking that if I spend enough time loving myself I won’t notice that no one else does?”

“You’re being crazy. Lots of people love you, and lots of people love your mother. She’s just a little selfish, and her brain is wired differently. She doesn’t see the world the same way you and I do. I know sometimes she says and does things that are a little, how do I phrase this, unorthodox, but she doesn’t mean to hurt you. Her heart is in the right place. It’s her mouth that gets her into trouble.”

“I know. What’s bothering me is that I’m noticing some similarities these days. She never got over Dad leaving, and certainly not him dying. If he had stayed around, maybe she’d be different. If Ben had stayed, I’d be different too. For starters, I wouldn’t be living in elastic pants. I look at her and I feel like I’m seeing myself in twenty years, and it terrifies me.”

“Women get divorced every day. Your mother isn’t the way she is because she’s divorced—she’s divorced because of the way she is. Your mother has spent her entire life refusing to grow up. Even after she had you guys, she was always selfish. Ultimately that’s what ran your father off, God rest his soul. You didn’t chase Ben away. He ran on his own because he’s a coward who’s not good enough for you. He never was.”

“What if people start to say that about me?” I asked. “ ‘Once upon a time Abby was cute and fun and pulled together, but after Ben left she went to hell with herself and now she needs a crane to get out of her house.’ It’s not a far stretch. I’m just so scared that I’m going to spend all of my energy pretending that I’m fine to the point where I start to believe I really am. That’s what happened to her. She drank her own Kool-Aid.”

“Cut your mother some slack. She went through hell trying to figure out how to raise you girls on her own. Being a single parent isn’t easy, and your mother did the best she could. You didn’t see how scared she was. I don’t defend some of the coping mechanisms she developed to deal with her divorce, but you have to at least try to understand her. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about repeating her mistakes. When you’re ready to move on, you will. I’m not worried about you,” she said forcefully as she rested her elbows on the table, sunlight dancing off the gold bracelets on her wrist.

“What if the choice isn’t mine to make? I’ve been thinking a lot about that kind of stuff lately,” I admitted. It felt good to say it out loud.

“What stuff?” she asked.

“How life can surprise you. When you’re little, you just assume that everything will work out. You think one day you’ll look up and there’ll be your Prince Charming on a white horse with a full head of hair and a dazzling white smile.”

“There’s a reason those fairy tales are geared toward little girls and not grown women who know better,” she said with the authority of a woman who was wise enough to have relinquished the concept of perfection a long time ago. “In real life that hair is a toupee and that smile is a veneer. And for the record, the princess in that story is wearing Spanx and a Wonderbra. That’s why those stories are called fairy tales and are not the headlines on the six o’clock news.”

“I know, but now look at me. At my age, finding a guy who hasn’t gone prematurely bald is like hitting the dating jackpot.”

“You know, baldness never bothered me,” Aunt Patrice said, tapping her manicured nail on the tablecloth. “At least you know what you’re buying. What’s infuriating is when you marry a guy who’s in great shape and then ten years later he can’t even see his toes. I knew I married a bald man. I had no idea there was a fat man hidden in that bald-headed body. Good thing I never loved your uncle Mac for his pecs,” she said.

“You’re missing my point,” I said with a smile. “I can’t help but feel like this fairy-tale nonsense that society beat into my brain when I was younger is partially responsible for my problems now.”

“A cartoon didn’t make Ben leave, Abby,” she reminded me. Just in case I needed a reminder.

“No, not that. I’m just realizing that I’m so quick to judge people, you know? It’s easy to find flaws in real live guys when you constantly compare them to the animated characters you watched when you were five.”

“Right, just like guys have problems dealing with real live women after they spend three hours looking at
Playboy.
Fantasy isn’t reality. You need to keep those two things separate or life is only going to get uglier from here. Stop being afraid of everyone. Stop looking for reasons to not try to be open to new relationships. You can’t lock yourself in a tower because you’re too afraid to live in the outside world.”

“Maybe that’s what all those princesses were doing. Maybe they decided they’d rather live on the far side of a moat and let their hair grow down to their asses than go on dates.”

“I don’t think that’s what Walt had in mind.”

“I hate Walt Disney. He completely fucked me up.”

“Abigail, do you hear yourself? You’re now blaming a man whose head is cryogenically frozen for your problems. Get out there and start dating. You might have some fun along the way. Did you ever think of that?”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I actually gave my number to a guy I met last week. I haven’t heard from him yet.”

“That’s fantastic! Does he have hair?” she said with a wink.

“Very funny.”

“Just trying to lighten this lunch up a bit.”

“The sad thing is that I was actually proud of myself for doing that, like giving out my cell number was some huge sign of progress. Do you know how pathetic that is?”

“Why’s that pathetic? That’s the first step toward meeting someone.”

“Maybe, but I’m still going to be dateless for Katie’s wedding. That’s not going to do much for my self-esteem. As if this extra weight hasn’t done enough damage.”

“Listen, it’s okay to be really pissed off by the timing of the wedding. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you’re struggling with it.”