Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (4 page)

I wrote that down.

“Life isn’t a beautiful gift to treasure every moment of. It’s shitty and unfair, and I’m not gonna give you any ‘wisdom’ on how to gracefully come to terms with life or death or anything.”

I nodded.

She exhaled, visibly relaxed—her forehead wasn’t tensed up anymore like it had been when I first knocked on her door—and shrugged.

“I could use a hand with the garden. If you want to come by a few days a week and help me out, you can pick my brain about when dinosaurs roamed Earth. How does that sound?”

“Yeah! Great.”

“Good. Starting now. Can you show me how to do an emoji?”

She handed me a cracked iPhone with no case. She’d been texting with someone called “K.,” flirtatiously bordering on straight-up smut.

I showed her how to access the emoji keyboard and handed it back. She vacillated between the wink face and the kiss-blowing face, then looked at me.

“Hello? Make yourself useful.”

“Kiss, I think. Wink emoji is a little bit ‘recently divorced dad.’ Also,” I said, “you spell
twerk
with an
e
.”

She revised and hit Send, and I was glad to see the ghost of a smile on her face at my response.

“You want some bourbon?”

“I’m fifteen.”

“What’s your point?”

After one faded flower teacup full of bourbon, I was drunk. Ruth drank triple that and seemed totally fine, considering she was asking me what books I was reading in English class, whereas I was trying to focus my vision while wondering who I could possibly persuade via text to take my make-out virginity.

“What are you reading?”

“The Turn of the Screw.”

“Good one. Classic. Sexual repression, ghosts—what’s your teacher’s name?”

“Mr. Radford.”

“What’s he like?”

“Uh, young.” I thought. “Enthusiastic.”

“You should do him!” She said it with the same tone of wholesome encouragement you’d use to say
You should do yoga!
or
You should visit Lake Placid!

“What?!”

“Don’t look at me like that. Every great writer has ‘turned the screw’ with a professor. Obviously it would be better if his balls hung a little lower, if he was older, more established, but . . .” She shrugged.

“Jesus Christ. Ew. Also, I’m not a—don’t call me that.”

“A what? A writer?”

I nodded.

“Why not?”

“It feels weird.”

“It’s supposed to feel weird. If it didn’t,
that
would be a problem.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “You want some more bourbon?”

Later that month, I finished my social studies assignment, which was honest to a fault (I got a B- and a
Please see me after class
, with “please” underlined thrice), but I stuck around to help with the garden, and Ruth and I have been friends ever since.

“You’re really wasting your energy worrying about this,” Ave informs me as she highlights some boring crap in her calc textbook. “Guys are like H&M tops to Ashley. Next week he’ll be in the Goodwill bin, and my parents will yell at her for insisting she’d wear it forever and being so wasteful with their money.”

I shake my head, gritting my teeth as I yank out the stubborn weeds congesting Ruth’s zinnias. “It’s because he’s special and she knows it.”

Ave makes a noise.

“Um, yes?”

“All I’m saying is, Ashley has horrible taste,” Avery tentatively begins as I sweat all over Ruth’s tea roses. “I mean, Kevin Rice? Hello?”

Ruth furrows her brow. “Who’s Kevin Rice?”

“A tool,” Ave and I say simultaneously.

“No. This is a tool.” Ruth holds up her spade. “I don’t know how either of you expect to get into good colleges if you can communicate only in street.”

“Sorry, in
street
?” I say, aghast. “Tell me, then—what
is
the appropriate word?”

“Asshole,” Ruth incants sagely and turns back to her petunias.

“Scarlett, maybe Ashley liking him is an indication that he sucks.”

“Inconceivable.”

“You only quote
The Princess Bride
when you’re afraid I’m right.”

“You’re dismissed. The real question is, why would he even like her? Aside from looking like a Hollister model and getting perfect grades”—I wilt a little but continue—“her whole personality is put on.”

Ruth shrugs, relighting the last of her J. “Sure. It’s usually a phase. Girls figure out what boys want, they do it for a while, then they stop. Trust me, I used to see it every year when I was teaching.”

“If she knows what boys want, I wish she’d tell me,” Ave mumbles under her breath, then trills sardonically, “As my parents would say, we’ve both been ‘blessed with our own gifts’! Here’s mine”—she points to her head—“and here’s hers.” She pantomimes big boobs, then instantly looks guilty and stops talking. That’s what happens whenever she rags on Ashley to me.

“I don’t know.” I sigh. “She’s not entirely devoid of person-ality. She just fakes being all awkward and shy and nerdy. Maybe it’s just what guys want now. Fake-awkward. She pretends to not know what she’s doing when she’s doing it.”

Avery reluctantly nods.

“But that’s what I mean,” says Ruth. “You’re genuine. There’s no artifice in you.”

“Often to your own detriment, bro,” mumbles Ave. I glare at her. She looks away innocently.

“You’re not the way you are and you don’t talk the way you talk because you think that’s what other people want from you.” Ruth shrugs. “It’s better. If you keep acting a certain way just because guys—or anyone—want you to, you’ll regret it.”

“It’s like she’s intentionally trying to make things—oh my GOD.” I drop my rake, struck with a massive realization.

“Are you okay?” Ave asks, alarmed.

“I’m Anne Hathaway and she’s Jennifer Lawrence!" I exclaim.

They both look at me like I’m insane.

“No, hear me out. Anne Hathaway is a celebrity. But she’s a real person—like, nerdy and loud and enthusiastic and excited about stuff, and people think she’s abrasive and they hate her.

“Whereas Jennifer Lawrence is, like . . . Anne Hathaway 2.0. I mean, she’s the new and improved version. Her PR team COULD make her come off totally perfect. But she’s designed precisely to
seem
like she’s been programmed with similar ‘real person’ bugs—but in a super-appealing way, nothing too weird
or unrelatable or abrasive. She sort of just seems to not give a shit. And everyone loves her because she’s such a ‘normal person,’ even though she’s not. You know?” I proclaim triumphantly. “Well, other than me.”

There is a long pause.

Avery rolls her eyes and says, “You are just, like . . . an endless
font
of bullshit sometimes.”

“Do those girls go to school with you?” Ruth asks, confused.

I’m about to reply when my phone signals I’ve received a text. I reach into the back of my shitty gardening jeans and pull it out. It’s from Dawn, and it says:
Emergency. Come home right now.

AS I RUN UP THE STAIRS OF OUR HOUSING COMPLEX TWO BY
two, a gaggle of eleven-year-old boys start snapping those little dollar-store firecrackers in the parking lot. I flail. They laugh. Mission accomplished.

We’re not poor, but after people at school—people whose families have refrigerators with water dispensers and ice makers built into them, or in-ground pools, or houses with an upstairs
and
a downstairs—started bitching about how the “middle class” is ignored by financial aid packages, I concluded that we are lower-lower middle class. Springsteen class, if you will, although I failed my written driver’s test and therefore have avoided the highway jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.

I stick my keys in the door and slam hard against it—it’s always jamming. This time it gives way easily, and I stumble inside.
Dawn’s sprawled on the sofa still wearing her baby-blue house-keeping uniform.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
is on in the background.

“What is it?” I’m gasping from the running.

She looks at me and starts sobbing words. All I can make out phonetically is something like, “I JUST,
MRAAAAAA
.”

“Whoa, hey, holy shit.” I drop my backpack on the floor and rush over to the sofa. She slides to the very end to make room for me, pushing herself with just her feet the way a kid would, her upper body remaining limp. A half-empty value pack of Twizzlers is tossed on the coffee table, the packaging ripped nearly in half. This is a bad sign, as Twizzlers are her sad food.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, alarmed.

She continues to cry and shakes her head.

“Can you . . . try to tell me?”

These crying jags are frequent enough that I’ve developed an efficient strategy: half
Gilmore Girls
, half
Jeopardy!
I’ll take Is It a Guy? for five hundred.

“Is it a guy?” I ask.

She nods, her face scrunching up and her eyes squeezing closed. It usually is, although occasionally it’s a work thing, and, in one particularly scary white wine–fueled instance, an “I should have been a better mother” thing. This I could deal with.

“I thought we agreed to save emergency texts for actual dismemberment,” I joke. She just looks at me. Her makeup has dripped down her face.

On our tiny TV, Bridget Jones bemoans how fat she is. In the two years since my dad left, I have watched a countless number
of these movies with Dawn, but I will never get over how fucked up they are. I wrinkle my nose.

“I’ll be honest with you; I’m not sure this is helping.”

I mute the movie, and Dawn smiles, wan. She appears to have gotten a little calmer and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffling.

“So, what happened?”

“I went on a really good date.” She sighs.

“From Match?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re
crying
? I don’t understand.”

“God. It’s just not gonna work out. You know?”

“Why? Is he married or something?”
Or a squatter? Or a twenty-five-year-old who said he’s thirty-seven because he “likes cougars”? Or prone to saying “I know I’m not black, but . . .”?
Just a couple of her old chestnuts.

“No. I mean, not that I know of. I just . . . something’s bound to be wrong with him, right? If he’s single at this age?”

“Not necessarily! You’re single at this age.”

Dawn glares at me.

“I mean, your age! Okay, sorry, you’re single at ‘an’ age.”

“That’s different. Single moms have a harder time.”

Inside, I wince with guilt. Like, she could’ve just named me Baggage Joan Epstein and then at least we’re all being honest.

“Well, I don’t know! Maybe you’re catching a break! I mean, finally, you know? You gotta climb up a mountain before you . . . I don’t know. Something!”

As she watches me, clinging to every positive word I say like a life raft, I desperately try to come up with a home run. She is a big fan of inspirational quotes, saying “morning affirmations” in the mirror and all that stuff. To my dismay, as I’m grasping for something, her face begins to squinch up again. There’s gotta be some beautiful, enlightening parable that’ll make her feel better.

I blurt, “Did you see on the news the other day, that lady in Cincinnati who found a chicken fetus in her McNugget?”

“What?” Dawn recoils. “Sweetie,
ew
.”

“Yeah, so, um, she ordered a six-piece McNugget, and she bit into one, and it made a weird noise, so she spit it out and saw that it was, like . . . a little unhatched chicken fetus. With, you know, breading or whatever.”

Dawn is incredibly grossed out. I’d better cut to the chase.

“So, like—maybe that lady got a defective McNugget that one time. Or maybe even, like, a few other times. Probably not, because, I mean, it’s unlikely, statistically speaking! But still so!”

I’m actually starting to work myself up with the disgusting pep talk at this point, but she still doesn’t look like she’s buying it. I soldier on.

“If that person really, really loved McNuggets, should a couple of chicken fetuses stop her from staying positive and getting right back into a McDonald’s and taking a chance on more McNuggets?” I ask passionately.

“It probably . . . um, should . . .” she says faintly.

“No! It should NOT!” I’m totally into this now.

Dawn looks perplexed. “I mean, do they keep going to the same McDonald’s? Because it seems like there are some major health violati—”

“Okay, I know, it’s not a perfect metaphor. My point is, a couple of chicken fetuses shouldn’t stop you from living your life! You see what I’m saying here?”

We both sit there sort of nodding encouragingly at each other for a couple of minutes like dashboard bobbleheads.

“I guess so.” She gains traction, her face brightening. “Yeah. I guess. I mean, right?”

“Totally!”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

“I mean, McYolo, you know?”

“Absolutely. No, you’re right. I just need to be positive.”

Satisfied that I’ve diffused the worst of this crisis, I snatch a Twizzler.

“What’s the guy’s name?” I ask, gnawing on it.

She smiles tentatively. “Brian.”

“What’s he do?”

“Accountant.”

“Has he called you yet?”

I have asked these questions so many times that I’ve developed a crisp and efficient delivery, like Mariska Hargitay on
Law & Order SVU
always asking the kid to point on the doll where the creepy uncle touched her.

“Yes. But I let it go to voice mail. I have to stay smart about it!
I don’t want to seem like I like him too much,” Dawn says sagely. She is really into all those dating mind-game books:
The Rules
and
Why Men Love Bitches
and
If You Do Something You Want to Do, You’ll Literally Ruin Everything.

I roll my eyes, like I usually do when she starts spewing this nonsense, and flick a Twizzler at her.

“Come on, who actually cares about that crap? That stupid ‘Who cares less?!’ death spiral is such a waste of time.”

Dawn shakes her head.

“Nope. I didn’t design it this way, but like I always tell you, the party with the least interest—”

“Has the most power,” I finish along with her. “God, you’ve only been saying that since I was a zygote. Whatever. Disagree.”

“I know it seems retro to you, but you’ll see the light real soon,” Dawn says confidently.

“I hope not,” I groan. “It’s so depressing.”

She unmutes
Bridget Jones’s Diary
right as Hugh Grant and his smirking face emerge from the elevator just as “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” starts playing.

Begrudgingly, I’m like, “Okay, that’s a really legit sound cue. Good job, movie.”

She smiles. Today’s emotional crisis is out of the red zone.

“But please, please promise me you’ll mute Colin Firth’s ‘just as you are’ speech.”

“I promise,” Dawn lies.

I finally escape to my room.

Dawn’s always been like this. Back in seventh grade, Avery had a slumber party. She, I, and a few other misfits from school that we had nothing else in common with got into sleeping bags in the Parkers’ freezing-cold basement and watched
Mean Girls
. When Regina George’s velour-tracksuited “not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom” started handing out virgin daiquiris, I felt all six pairs of eyes swivel toward me, starting with Had Her Period on White Pants and Nobody Told Her Leslie and ending with Legitimately Mentally Slow Jenna.

And those are just my
friends’
reactions. Last year at the Drama Club fall potluck dinner, Dawn rushed in, tugging down the hem of her electric-blue bandage dress, with boxed Entenmann’s cookies she tossed hastily on the table with the other moms’ homemade casseroles and pies.

“Who’s the old skank?” Ashley asked Natalia, not quietly (she probably thinks sotto voce is a type of coffee), knowing perfectly well that the old skank was my mom.

Later, predictably, they sang “Take Me or Leave Me” from
Rent
as both sets of parents filmed it from opposite sides of the audience, because to get only one angle would have been a huge social injustice.

At worst, Dawn and I don’t get along. At best, we confuse each other. Like, she’s in a zillion Meetup groups that all have some misleading title like “Melville Museumgoers” but are just a cover for a bunch of women drinking pinot grigio in someone’s
den and talking about how shitty their kids and ex-husbands are. She comes home, and I ask her something pointed like “Did you check out the Goya exhibit?” and she replies distantly, “I had a really good share today.” Then she pours white wine over some ice cubes, goes into her bedroom, shuts the door, and listens to one Macy Gray song on repeat.

Dawn thinks I should open up and be more receptive to groups. I remind her that history rarely reflects well on groups of people who bond and get carried away. “You’re more like your father every minute” is her muttered reply. Sometimes I get the feeling she wants to squash the Dad half of me like it’s a cockroach. She even tried to get me to use her maiden name for a hyphenated surname. I said the only way on Earth I’d do that is if her maiden name was Barr, which it is not.

Her most blatant attempt to “connect” with me came in the form of a trip to Disney World. We drove down, sharing a motel bed on the way. But my mother omitted one important piece of information, which was that we could only afford the vacation in the first place because some timeshare was having a promotion. In exchange for the discount rate, we had to sit through a three-hour tour of available units and get the skinny on why going in on a three-bedroom condo in Fort Lauderdale was the Best! Decision! Ever!

I knew I’d have to distract Dawn from the details of the pitch because she’s one of those people who always says “Yes!” when canvassers in New York stop us and ask if we care about starving children or if we get our hair cut. Even that time it
made us twenty minutes late to see her favorite musical, which obviously is
Rent
.

To preoccupy her, I started whispering stories about the employees as they showed us around: “Milania and Alex commiserated about what a waste college was last week at TGI Fridays and wound up sleeping together even though he has a girlfriend.

“Devin who just offered us Diet Cokes obviously wanted to be an actor, and every time some retiree stops his pitch mid-sentence to ask a question, he hopes that they’ll request the ‘ABC’ monologue from
Glengarry Glen Ross
, but of course it never happens.”

She stared at me.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” she said.

“Remember what?”

“Your dad used to do that.”

I’d forgotten, but it came back to me in bits and pieces as soon as she said it. He’d tell us voyeuristic tales of the people in front of us at the DMV and make up backstories about the waitresses to keep us entertained while we waited to be seated at Perkins. At least, he’d do that in the rare instances he wasn’t locked in his bedroom working on his novel.

A lot of my memories from when I was little revolve around that closed door and Dawn taking me to get Dairy Queen or putting on a really inappropriate movie like
Basic Instinct
or
Fatal Attraction
to distract me
.
We had even less money than we have now, so it made no sense to me when Dawn would say, “Daddy’s
working.” I get it now that I’m older, but sometimes I worry, like a big old Lifetime movie child-of-divorce cliché, how much I had to do with him leaving. If I’m part of what he wanted to upgrade from.

Dawn was waiting for me to say if I remembered or not. But it’s not a time I like thinking about.

“Look.” I pointed to a pretty girl at the wheel of a Lexus, text-ing frantically. “Alex’s girlfriend just found out she’s pregnant.”