The Beautiful Between (5 page)

7

Jeremy doesn’t come over for his nightly cigarette, but that doesn’t surprise me, since it’s Saturday. Surely he has better things to do on a Saturday night: hot parties, hot girls. Princes don’t get carded, so I’m sure he’s at one of those fabulous Manhattan spots, dancing with the latest It Girl, or at least with members of her entourage.

And the thing is, I’m not jealous, not exactly. I have a lot of work to do—I may have the verbal half of the SATs down, but the math is still kicking my ass. But I do wonder what that sort of life would be like. I don’t want to live that way all the time, but maybe once in a while—be bad, freak my mother out by coming home at four in the morning, try drinking or smoking pot and just seeing what it is about being one of the cool kids that’s so appealing.

Jeremy would never invite me—I’m the girl he smokes private cigarettes with, sits with for a few minutes during lunch. I’m not a girl he’d invite to go partying. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t, because I’m sure I don’t seem the type who would go. It’d be too embarrassing for him, for me, for everyone.

On Sunday, my mother and I have brunch. As we walk to the restaurant, I wonder what would happen if I asked her about my father, if I asked her how he died. But after so many years of silence on the topic, I’m not about to just bring it up over bagels and lox. But I wonder what would happen if I did.

We order, and she waits until the food comes to broach the subject I’m sure she’d been dying to talk about for a while now.

“So, is Jeremy Cole going to be coming over to study this week?”

I think it’s funny that she calls him by his full name. I decide to do the same. “I doubt it. Jeremy Cole was helping me with physics, and I think he’s gotten my grade up.”

“That certainly was nice of him.”

“Yeah, well, I was helping him with the SATs.”

My mother laughs. “Oh, honey, I’m sure you were, but you know the Coles can afford a private tutor.” She’s not saying this to be mean—she means it like, See, that was just his excuse to get to spend time with you, because he likes you.

I try to pretend that I haven’t been thinking the same thing myself. I try to pretend that I’m not every bit as curious as she is about his sudden interest in me.

“I know they can, but I think he was just trying to make me feel better about needing help in physics.”

“What a gentleman.” She takes a bite of her food. “Of course, it’s such a shame about the daughter.”

I look up at her sharply. “The daughter? Do you mean Kate?”

“Yes. Oh, honey, haven’t you heard?” I shake my head. “Well, I don’t know the details of it, but apparently she’s very sick. Didn’t you know? Hasn’t she been missing school lately?”

“Yeah.” I chew thoughtfully. “I haven’t seen her, actually, in almost a week. More.”

“Oh dear. They’re such a lovely family.” I nod, not really paying attention anymore (honestly, what does it matter whether they’re a lovely family or not?), but wondering what’s the matter with Kate, what kind of sickness she has. Kate, the girl who thinks I’m cool. And pretty.

My mother continues, “You know my friend Marian?” I nod. “Well, she’s friends with Ellie Swift, who’s practically best friends with Joanie Cole, Jeremy’s mom?” I nod again. “Well, apparently Ellie told Marian that Kate Cole is sick—she wouldn’t tell her with what, didn’t want to betray Joanie’s confidence.”

“It’s a little late for that,” I cut in, realizing as I say it how mean it sounds.

My mother looks startled. “What? Well anyhow, it’s quite serious. Marian said obviously Joanie’s in denial about it, but she—Marian—can tell it’s really very serious.”

My mother could be a seventh grader, sharing gossip by the lockers. In my head, I see her in a pleated skirt, textbooks in her arms; I picture her gossiping with Marian and Ellie outside the lunchroom. I try not to wonder about Kate. With my mother’s tendency toward hyperbole, Kate’s illness might be something relatively minor, like a severe case of the flu or something—enough to keep her out of school, but nothing that could do any permanent damage. Jeremy would have told me if there was anything more serious.

Well, actually, of course he wouldn’t. He never tells me anything about himself, and come to think of it, I never tell him anything about myself. We limit our conversations to school, studying, and Anorexic Alexis. That’s pretty much it.

And certainly if it was serious, Jeremy wouldn’t have come by to smoke every night like that. He would have been home with his family. Why would he want to stand on a corner with me at a time like that?

My mother and I go shopping after brunch. We walk down Madison, from the Eighties to the Seventies, stopping in little boutiques along the way. My mother is on an accessories kick. She picks out belts, and for the first time I notice that maybe her fashion sense isn’t as perfect as I used to think. She always seemed so glamorous to me: the best-dressed mom when she took me to school, not like the moms who showed up in the morning wearing sweats or leggings, looking like they just got out of bed. No, my mother had outfits; she dressed up for everything. Now I wonder who she was trying to impress. She picks out shoes much flashier than I would ever wear, and I’m a teenager. I want to tell her they’re not right, but I think she’d get mad, or hurt. So I keep my thoughts to myself and we continue down Madison, on to the next store. In the Seventies, there’s one block where the sidewalk is paved differently than it is anyplace else. The cement literally shines in the sunlight; there are sparkles on the sidewalk. When I was little, I used to imagine the street was paved with gold and silver for the princes and princesses walking across it, and even for me. I concentrate on it now, squinting at the sparkles, still not quite understanding how or why they paved it that way.

Later, while my mom is still shopping, I decide to do some amateur detective work at home. Like, really amateur—my detective work is limited to going through the drawers in my mother’s desk, a piece of furniture I’d never really taken notice of before; it always seemed more decorative than functional. My mother takes up most of the apartment—on phone calls, she literally paces from one end to the other, snaking her way in and out of each room, even the bathrooms. Her clothes take up the closets in her bedroom, the ones by the front door, and even part of the closets in my room. I don’t think she could possibly confine anything of importance to something as small as this desk.

But still, its three drawers are the only place I can think to start looking, even if I’ve never actually seen her sit there.

The first drawer is full of envelopes and stamps—old stamps, like twenty-five-cent ones that would barely get a postcard to its destination now. And old greeting cards: not cards she’s received, but cards I’m sure she intended to send to people—blank birthday cards and anniversary cards and get-well-soon cards. I’m sure my mother bought them all so that she’d have a supply on hand when the need arose, but I’m equally certain she has no memory that they’re here. Or maybe she’s just stocked up this drawer because she believes that a woman should have such a supply at her disposal.

The second drawer, I’m surprised to find, has old pictures of mine—not photographs of me, but drawings with crayon and marker that I made when I was much younger. I find my kindergarten diploma, which isn’t really a diploma so much as a piece of construction paper on which we’d drawn pictures of ourselves and over which our teacher wrote “Kindergarten Diploma.” When I was little, my now-dark hair had flecks of blond in it, and I notice that I’d tried to show this in my picture by using both brown and yellow markers for my hair. The result makes it look like I had a group of bumblebees attacking my skull. I take it from the drawer to save it. I’m sure that my mother won’t miss it.

The third drawer is photographs. My mother has albums, but she never fills them properly, and ends up leaving photos around the apartment: stuck between books on shelves, piled up in a basket in the kitchen and on top of her bedstand, crammed into her jewelry box. She may hate clutter, but she’s still not particularly organized. The photos in the desk are older, like maybe she stuffed them in here when she cleared up the piles of photos that she’d left around the house we lived in before my father died, before we moved into Gram’s apartment. There are baby pictures of me, pictures of her from when she was in college, pictures of her when she was pregnant and of my grandparents holding me not long after I was born. And there are pictures of my father, of course. There’s one of him holding me as a baby; one with both my parents in which it looks like they were off to a costume party—he’s dressed as a football player, she as a cheerleader. And there is one of the two of them sitting in a chair, my mother on my father’s lap. It must have been taken in the seventies or early eighties: their outfits make me laugh. Both of their pants flare out at the bottom. My mother is smiling at the camera and my father is smiling in another direction, like he’s in conversation with someone across the room, his arms twist around her back. I don’t know why, but this picture means more to me than the ones I find from their wedding day, of the three of us together, of my father holding me while I sleep. I don’t take any of them except for this one of the two of them. I think I like it best because they just look like any other young couple. There’s no gravity to it, no wedding ceremony or new baby, and certainly no awareness that their time together would be limited. They were just a pair of young people spending time with friends. It’s comforting to think of them this way—there’s nothing special about them; they weren’t marked, somehow; you couldn’t tell that they were going to come to a sad end. Maybe they weren’t even married or engaged yet in this picture. They were just hanging out, the way I would like to someday with a boyfriend.

I tuck the picture into my copy of
A Farewell to Arms
, next to a paragraph about having enough love so that you never have to feel lonely. I wonder if my mother is lonely. She wasn’t my mother yet in this picture; she wasn’t much older than I am now—maybe my age exactly. Maybe my parents were high school sweethearts. I know that they grew up together, lived only a few blocks away from each other here in the city. My mother went to an all-girls school, though, so they can’t have gone to school together. It occurs to me that he might have been the only man she ever loved. If he’d lived, who knows what might have happened between them—maybe they’d have had more kids, or maybe they’d have fought, had affairs, gotten bored with each other and divorced. But no doubt my mother believes that she would have lived a happy life with him, had he lived. It must be incredibly lonely, believing that.

I know that I haven’t found anything to help me on my search, nothing other than some evidence that my parents were in love. And that is something, but it has nothing to do with how he died, and that’s supposed to be what I’m looking for. I didn’t think I would find anything, but I’m disappointed anyway, because I’m not at all sure where to go next.

Luckily, Jeremy calls that night from a taxi to tell me that he’s on the way over for a cigarette, which provides a nice distraction.

I should, I know, be angry with Jeremy, or at least irritated at his audacity—calling me every night of the week except Saturday, when he had something better to do. And angry at myself for always being here, always being available. The truth is, I never have anything better to do than to stand outside my lobby while he smokes. Even when I go to a movie or something with girls from school, I’m home by around ten. And somehow Jeremy knew that about me—not only does he know it now that we’ve been hanging out, but even before, it never occurred to him that I might have had a reason to say no to him. I guess princes don’t ever expect to hear the word “no.”

As I step out of the elevator, cross the lobby, and get hit with a chilly burst of evening air coupled with the odor of cigarette smoke, I decide that I should, in fact, be very, very angry at Jeremy and that it is not okay to treat me like this, to invite himself over. Tonight he has called me from the cab on his way here—he didn’t even call first to make sure I was available, to make sure I wanted to see him.