We Could Be Beautiful (6 page)

Caroline, somewhat surprisingly (I hoped it might be too last-minute for her to come) and also not surprisingly at all (she never said no), wrote: “Yes! Italian place!” Which was great—she’d walk Mom there, I could be a few minutes late—and it was also so typically Caroline. She loved to involve herself in anything that involved me. She’d been like that since we were kids, always trying to make my friends into her friends, adopting my interests as her own. I wanted to take horseback riding lessons, Caroline wanted to take horseback riding lessons. I wanted blond hair, Caroline wanted blond hair. That had happened when we were teenagers. Our family Christmas card that year was ridiculous: two platinum-blond children between our dark-haired parents. It looked like they had adopted us from Sweden. Now that we were adults, I knew I was supposed to be flattered by the way Caroline looked up to me, but most of the time it was suffocating.

I also had a lot of opinions about Caroline’s life. One would assume that a normal mother of three wouldn’t have the flexibility to just run out for lunch with half an hour’s notice, but Caroline’s mothering techniques were turning out to be exactly like our own mother’s: fully dependent on nannies. Caroline actually had three nannies, one per child. Betty and Caleb, the two-year-old twins, often ran to the nannies when they were upset, which didn’t seem to bother Caroline at all (“Good for them,” she said once). And Spencer, the poor five-year-old, who was such a lovely boy—delicate and feathery, he reminded me of the character in
Le Petit Prince
—was going through a phase where he seemed genuinely confused about who to show his little Play-Doh sculptures to. I knew Caroline’s lack of involvement bothered her pediatrician husband, Bob, because she had let that slip once in a vulnerable moment. Her main point of defense when the nanny thing came up was that she had had those children with her own body! She could just as easily have hired a surrogate. If Bob couldn’t wake up and smell what year it was, and see how much she had sacrificed (hello, stretch marks!), then that was his problem.

I arrived just in time to find them at the door of Da Castelli. Caroline held Mom’s elbow in a way that suggested this was a very stressful thing to do. I told myself to be perky—if Vera could be perky, I could be perky—and said, with way too much enthusiasm, as though I had just popped out of a cardboard birthday cake in a stupid hat, “Hey guys!”

“Hey!” Caroline dropped the elbow and threw her arms around me. It was her signature hug-you-to-death hug, designed to squeeze the love out of you by force. I held my breath, braced myself. I knew it would hurt and it did. Our bones pressed together.

She’d obviously just gone to the gym and hadn’t showered yet. Her dark brown hair (long, same as mine) was matted to her forehead, and she looked even thinner than usual, in spandex pants that were scary roomy around her pencil-straight calves.

“Hi.” I held her barely. I didn’t want to break her. “Hi Mom,” I said with my birthday messenger fervor, this time as though it were a child’s birthday I was arriving for. I had promised myself when Mom started to lose it that I would never be one of those ladies who addressed children and animals and old people in miniature, cooing voices, and here I was, doing it. I guess my hope was that if I sounded excited, Mom would take it as a cue to be excited herself. It had never worked, and it didn’t work now either.

“Hello, Catherine,” she said, her eyes wide and bewildered.

I gently touched her shoulder—red rain jacket, slick from the drizzle—and kissed her very rouged cheek. Her makeup looked good, if a little heavy, but at least she looked like herself today. Some days the women who worked at the home made her up so severely. She would emerge with thick foundation and blue eye shadow and crusty eyelashes, looking like a pimping madam in a Broadway show. But even on those days she always smelled like herself: Lancôme products and rose oil. Despite my mother seeming less and less like my mother all the time, and more like a stranger lost in the street, these smells always brought me back. Lancôme and rose oil. This was my mother.

My mother and I looked a lot alike: hazel eyes, almond-shaped; eyebrows that cut straight across, barely any arch. This gave us a serene and pensive expression, which was funny for being so wrong. We were anxious people, prone to constant shifting and stirring and paranoia. My nose was larger—it was my father’s nose—and hers was small and upturned. She’d had it done to look exactly like Caroline’s (whose nose was nearly perfect), and we had all been very impressed with the surgeon’s work. The three of us were obviously related—same coloring, same hair—but up close, other than her nose, Caroline’s features were just slightly off, just slightly askew. Her eyebrows grew in wildly different directions—one looked like a fucked-up tadpole—and her eyes were a few important millimeters too far apart, and her smile on one side was unable to achieve the height that it did on the other.

Da Castelli was dark wood, cherry-red booths, white linen tablecloths, mirrors everywhere. It smelled like garlic bread. The bald maitre d’, whose name we should have known by now but didn’t, took a stack of menus from his podium. “Ciao, ragazze West, follow me.”

Caroline held Mom’s hand, leading her toward the table, and I walked close behind, ready if she fell. We were such idiots at this, such novices. Even the small task of lunch was almost too much, and we watched Mom with wired eyes, full of fear that something bad would happen and it would be our fault. I hoped the people at the restaurant—the older couple by the window, eating pizza, the guy in a Yankees hat at the bar—interpreted this not as fear but as extreme loving cautiousness.

One of the reasons I wanted to have a child was that I knew it would change me into a person who was capable of really caring for another person. My plan, if it happened—an “if” that felt less promising every day—was to hire no nannies at all. To which Susan had said, “You’re not serious. You don’t even know how to iron a shirt.” But I was serious. And (this had come to me later, and I planned on telling Susan the next time it came up) raising a child had nothing to do with ironing a shirt. I planned to hire someone to iron the shirts while I breast-fed, swaddled, got no sleep, sacrificed my life to another human being, etc.

“Your usual table.” The maitre d’ knew how important it was to keep things familiar for Mom. He pulled out a chair.

“Caroline, Caroline, Caroline, Caroline,” our mother was saying.

“What?”

She pointed to the ground. Caroline’s foot was on her coat.

“Shit, sorry,” she said, and lifted it off. We all looked at the wet tread mark left by her Reebok.

“Don’t curse,” Mom said, and decided to ignore the chair and sit in the booth instead. She scooted herself down it in a series of incremental thrusts until her placemat was square in front of her.

Caroline sat next to me instead of Mom. Of course she had to be as close to me as possible.

The good thing about Da Castelli was that Mom liked it now. A year ago she hated it for not being Silvano’s on the Upper East Side, and would order only the veal with rosemary, because that’s what she was so used to saying: “Veal with rosemary, thank you.” The very nice chef here had replicated it for her for months, until one day Mom, for no apparent reason, decided she would have salmon pasta, light on the cream sauce, and a glass of your driest prosecco, thank you.

Now we all ordered the same thing every time. I would have the salad with goat cheese, and Caroline would have three bites of her penne, extra-extra pesto. (Caroline had the palate of a child.) It was an act of solidarity that had evolved by accident.

We took the menus from the maitre d’. Only Mom opened hers. She looked at it confidently, even though I knew the cursive was too small for her to read because it was too small for anyone to read.

“You look good, Mom.” I felt a little bad that I always said this, whether it was true or not, but at least today it was.

“Who did your hair, Mom?” Caroline smiled at the waiter who filled her water glass. She was right. Mom’s hair—a high bun today—was overteased and oversaturated in hair spray. It looked like a bird had misplaced its nest on top of her head.

“The girl,” Mom said.

“Which one?”

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Don’t quiz her.”

Caroline buzzed with her usual high voltage. “I thought we were supposed to ask questions about what’s going on in the present.”

“Yeah, but don’t push her.” I managed to say this more calmly than I felt it.

We looked at our mother, who had taken her coat partway off (we should have taken it off for her before she sat down) so that one arm was in and the other was out. With her free hand, she was buttering a slice of warm bread.

“Mom, let me take your coat,” I said.

Mouth full, she shooed me away, but I stood up anyway and freed the other arm before she yelled, “Stop!”

“Okay, okay,” I whispered, to illustrate that she had been too loud. The now empty arm of her rain jacket stuck out awkwardly beside her like it still contained something living inside it.

“Mom, you seriously want to sit on your coat during this whole lunch?” Caroline scratched her neck. It was probably itchy with the dried sweat from her workout.

“Yes,” our mother said, “I would like to sit right here where I am.”

Caroline rolled her eyes and smiled at me. I smiled back. Our shared stress over Mom was the closest thing to a connection we had, and it reminded me that, okay, fine, I was glad she was here. Doing this alone would have been a nightmare.

When the waiter came to take our orders and Mom said hers right, we exchanged another look. “Go Mom,” Caroline said.

“How’s Bob?” I asked her.

“Good. Busy. How’s the shop?”

“Good.”

Caroline hummed along to a song in her head (there was always a song in her head) until her eyes landed on my nails. They were a deep red right now. “Do you get gel or regular?”

I wanted to say, You have ADD. But what I said instead was, “Regular. The gel ruins your nails.”

“Seriously?” Caroline frowned, looking at her own nails, which were fire-engine red and had obviously just been done, probably with gel. “Mom, let’s see your nails.”

“Absolutely not.” Mom curled her fingers into her palms and hid them under the table.

“Mom.”

“Catherine, I’m not interested in you right now.”

“Mom, it’s me, Caroline. Ca-ro-line.” To me Caroline said, “I hate that.”

“Mom, why did you give us such similar names?”

“They are not similar,” Mom said.

“It’s not that,” Caroline said. “She calls me Catherine because she loves you more.”

I made a look like “No,” but everyone knew that was true. For some reason Mom had never really liked Caroline. I knew this not just because I could feel it (everyone could), but also because of the things Mom would whisper to me as a child. “You are the strong one,” she would say, gin-lime breath and her hand firm on the back of my neck.

The bread in Mom’s hand had lipstick all over it, and there was lipstick on her teeth. She was still beautiful, or at least she was obviously someone who had been beautiful once, and she carried herself like that—like a person who understood the value of outward appearances in the world. Despite being old and confused now, she still possessed a grace. I knew I had inherited some but not all of this grace. I moved well, but not as well as my mother in her prime. Caroline had actually inherited more of Mom’s great body, but she moved like a wrestler: hunched shoulders and a waddling hustle.

Her phone rang—some ridiculous rap song that was cool right now—and she answered. After a second she said, “Well, can you go to the store?” and then, more sternly, “Leave Caleb with Amelia and go to Fairway.”

Our mother looked out the window. I would have liked to say that before this, I might have known what she was thinking, but my mother had always been a difficult person to know. She was cold and detached and thought emotions were a handicap. She had said “I love you” only two times that I could remember, both in dire circumstances: when I broke my leg horseback riding and on the turbulent flight to Paris when she was sure we were about to die. She had probably never said it to Caroline. My father had been the warm one. He hugged us; he told us he loved us often. In college a psychic had told me that our mother was the moon and our father was the sun. Caroline, sensing our mother’s distance from her at an early age, had clung to our father like a monkey to a tree. Literally. I remember him trying to leave for work, dressed in his suit, smelling of coffee, and Caroline wrapping her arms around his neck and refusing to let go.

Caroline hung up. “Oh my God. These people can’t do anything without me. It’s like a full-time job telling them what to do.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Apparently my son is out of fish sticks and the nanny can’t figure out to go to the store.”

“I love how your nanny doesn’t even have a name.”

“Tonia. You don’t know her because she’s new.” Caroline dipped a piece of bread in olive oil and set it on her plate.

“Fine,” I said.

“Can you please be nice to me?”

Mom, in her stern voice, said, “They must know you’re the one in charge, Catherine.”

Caroline sighed. “Thanks, Mom.”

I felt bad for Caroline. She seemed like she was coming a little unglued lately. I put my hand on her shoulder. I was aware that I did this not very gently but more like a basketball coach. For a second I thought she might cry. Of the three of us, she was the only one who might actually do that in public.

“Thanks, sis,” she said, her face full of rejection. Caroline so badly wanted to be best-friend sisters. She had always been searching for a deeper connection that I just never felt we had. Sometimes I thought she was living in a fantasy world, a world where life could be like the movies. Caroline loved movies. She had seen everything. It often felt like her actions were taken from a scene in a movie she’d just watched. When she said, “Thanks, sis,” now, for example, I wondered in what film some bleary-eyed actress had said, “Thanks, sis.” Her efforts came off as staged because they were staged, but her desperation was so authentic that it was hard not to feel very sorry for her all the time, and it was exhausting.