It was a relief, in a way. Sometimes it felt like a relief to be invisible.
Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in the sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.
A girl named Katie complained about her roommate while Tibby chewed listlessly on pasta salad. It had as much taste as her sleeve. She chewed and nodded, nodded and chewed. It was a good thing she’d been born with her friends, Tibby realized, because she was terrible at making them.
A few minutes later she followed the group up the stairs of the arts building and into the classroom. She sat on the edge so there would be empty seats next to her. Partly she wanted to lessen her commitment to this particular group. Mostly she was waiting for Alex.
Her heart sped up when he arrived with Maura and sat down next to Tibby. Maura sat on his other side. Granted, they were the only two empty seats together left in the room.
The instructor, Mr. Russell, organized his papers. “All right, class.” He held up his hands. “As you know, this is your project seminar. This class is not about listening but about doing.”
Alex was taking notes in his binder. Tibby couldn’t resist glancing at them.
Class about doing.
Was he joking? He glanced at Tibby. Yes, he was joking. “You’re each going to make a film this summer, and you’ll have nearly the entire term to do it. You’ll spend a lot of time out in the world and a little time in this class.”
Alex was now drawing a picture. It was Mr. Russell, only his head was very tiny and his hands were very large. It was a pretty good picture. Did Alex know Tibby was peeking at it? Did he mind?
“The assignment,” Mr. Russell went on, “is to make a biographical piece. Focus the film on somebody who’s played an important role in your life. You are welcome to use scripts and actors or to make a documentary. It’s up to you.”
Tibby had an idea of what she wanted to do. It just arrived in her head. It arrived in the image of Bailey. Her friend Bailey, last summer, sitting against the slatted blinds in Tibby’s bedroom window with the sunlight sliding through in the last month of her twelve-year-long life. It made Tibby’s eyes ache. She looked to her left.
Up to you, Alex wrote in flowery calligraphy under the picture of Mr. Russell.
Tibby rubbed her eyes. No, she didn’t want to do that idea. She couldn’t do that idea. She didn’t permit herself to even give that idea a worded tag in her brain. She let it float back out the way it had come.
For the rest of the class she felt haunted by the feeling of the idea, even though the idea itself was gone. She forgot about Alex and his notes. Her eyes seemed to focus only a few inches in front of her face.
She forgot about him until he was talking right next to her ear. It took her a few moments to realize he was talking to her ear. Or rather, to her.
“Do you want to get coffee?” he seemed to be asking.
Maura was looking at her expectantly too.
“Oh …” When Alex’s words arranged themselves into the proper order, Tibby discovered she was pleased. “Now?”
“Sure.” Maura appeared to have taken over the planning. “Do you have another class?”
Tibby shrugged. Did she? Did it matter? She stood up and lifted her bag over her shoulder.
They sat in the back of the café at the student union building. It turned out both Alex and Maura were from New York City, which Tibby might have guessed. It also turned out Maura’s room was on the seventh floor of Tibby’s dorm. Maura was particularly interested in Vanessa, the RA.
“Did you see her room?”
Tibby’s attention was drifting over to Alex. Maura wasn’t willing to let it go.
“Seriously, did you see it?”
“No,” Tibby said.
“It’s full of toys and stuffed animals. I swear to God. The girl is a freeeeak.”
Tibby nodded. She didn’t doubt that, but she was more interested in listening to Alex talk about his project. “It’s pure nihilism. Think Kafka, but with a lot of explosions,” he was explaining.
Tibby laughed appreciatively even though she didn’t know what nihilism meant and she couldn’t name a single thing Kafka had written. He was a writer, wasn’t he?
Alex had a wry smile.“Kafka meets early Schwarzenegger, and the whole thing takes place in a Pizza Hut.”
He is smart, Tibby thought. “And how is this biographical?” she asked.
Alex shrugged and cast her a low-level smile. “Dunno,” he said, like he couldn’t be bothered.
“So what’s your project going to be? Do you know yet?” Maura asked her.
Tibby didn’t even allow herself the idea of her first idea, though it cast its shadow from high above her head. “I don’t know…. I’m thinking probably I’ll …”
Tibby had no idea how she was going to end this sentence. She looked down at Alex’s Pumas. She wanted her movie to be funny. She wanted Alex to smile at her the way he had in Bagley’s class.
She thought of the stuff she’d already filmed this summer. She’d caught this hilarious bit of her mom bustling around the kitchen, unaware that she had Nicky’s lollipop stuck to the back of her head. It was a dumb gag, but it was funny.
“I’m thinking I’ll probably do kind of a comic one … about my mom.”
Carmen wished the ride to the Morgans’ were longer so she could complain longer. She could tell Lena felt the ride was long enough.
“I understand, I really do,” Lena said sweetly but with diminishing patience as she pulled up in front of the large white clapboard house. “I’m just saying, your mom hasn’t gone on a date in a long time. It’s exciting for her.”
Lena glanced at Carmen’s sour face. “But then again, she’s not my mom. If she were, maybe I’d feel exactly the same way.”
Carmen studied her suspiciously. “No. You wouldn’t.”
Lena shrugged. “Well, I don’t think my mom ever kissed a guy other than my dad, so it’s pretty hard to picture,” she reasoned diplomatically. “But if she did—”
“You would be kind about it,” Carmen finished.
“No one is kind to their mom,” Lena said.
“You are,” Carmen accused.
“Oh, no, I’m not,” Lena said with feeling.
“You get annoyed and maybe huffy sometimes, Len, but you’re not openly bratty.”
“Annoyed and huffy can be even worse than bratty,” Lena argued.
The shiny red front door opened, and Jesse Morgan stood waving at them from the top step.
“I have to go,” Carmen said. “Can you pick me up? I’ll drive tomorrow.”
“You can’t drive tomorrow. If you do, I’ll be late again,” Lena said.
“You won’t be. Seriously. I’ll get up early. I promise.”
Carmen often promised this but never actually did it.
“Oh, all right.” Lena always gave her another chance. It was a little dance they did.
“Hi, Jesse,” Carmen said, hurrying up the walk. She grabbed him in a brief headlock as she passed through the door. Jesse was four and liked to keep track of who came and went on Quincy Street. Also, he liked to yell puzzling things to people on the sidewalk from his second-story bedroom window.
Carmen walked straight back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Morgan was cleaning Rice Krispies off the floor with one hand and holding Joe, the nine-month-old, with the other.
Carmen had already learned not to give the kids Rice Krispies, because they were harder to clean up than, say, Kix. That was something an outsider could figure out in a day and a mother would never think of. Wet, walked-on Rice Krispies were part of Mrs. Morgan’s unquestioned burden.
“Hi, everybody,” Carmen sai
d. She held out her hands to Joe, but he clung to his mother. Joe did like Carmen, but only when his mother was out of the house.
“Hi, Carmen. How are you?” Mrs. Morgan threw some Saran-wrapped objects from the refrigerator to the garbage can. “I’m going out to run some errands. I’ll be back at noon. I’m on the cell if you need me.”
Prolonging the inevitable, Joe surveyed Carmen from where his head lay on his mother’s shoulder. Carmen remembered what Lena had said about not being kind to your mother. Joe was kind to his mother. He adored her. Had Carmen been kind to her mother when she was a baby? Maybe you were kind only when you were very young or very old.
She accepted a wriggling, protesting Joe from Mrs. Morgan.
As soon as she had him settled on the floor with stackable buckets, he took off his sock and started chewing on it. The sock had a little rubber tic-tac-toe pattern on the bottom. For traction, Carmen figured.
“No, Joe. Don’t eat your socks.”
Jesse was watching the cars go by through a small pane of glass just the height of his face at the side of the front door. “Hey, Jess. What do you see?”
Jesse didn’t answer. Carmen liked the fact that though grown-up people felt the need to check in with a lot of useless questions and statements, children rarely felt the need to answer them.
“I have to make a pee,” he said after a while. Carmen picked up Joe and followed Jesse upstairs. For some reason Jesse only liked to use the bathroom upstairs. She decided to change Joe’s diaper while she was up there. She laid him down on the diaper pad and let him gum the tube of ointment. Could zinc oxide hurt you if ingested?
She opened the top drawer of his bureau, admiring the neat assortment of socks, all carefully matched, all primary colors, all with the little tic-tac-toes on the bottoms. Mrs. Morgan seemed like an intelligent woman to be spending so much energy on socks. Hadn’t she gone to law school? Could you be overqualified for this job?
Carmen thought of her mother sitting at the kitchen table of the old house, dragging a fork along the bottoms of Carmen’s new birthday-party shoes so Carmen wouldn’t slip on the shiny floors at Lena’s house.
Downstairs, Carmen called her mom at work. “Hi,” she said when her mom answered. That was really all she wanted to say.
“Nena, I’m glad you called.” Christina was breathless. “I’m going out for dinner with David tonight. If that’s okay. There’s, uh, lasagna in the freezer.” Her mother sounded distracted. Not distracted as in looking for the stapler, but deeply distracted.
“Really? Again?” Carmen paused awhile, wishing her mother would pick up on her mood.
“I won’t be late,” her mother assured her. “It’s crazy this week.”
“Well. Okay.” Carmen’s voice was soft. “Bye.”
There had definitely been a time, maybe as recently as the day before, when Carmen would have loved the idea of a night with the apartment all to herself. But right now she didn’t.
An hour or so later she checked her messages. There was one from Paul, returning a call of hers. There was one from Porter. The notorious after-date phone call. If a guy called within three days, he liked you. If he waited a week, that meant he didn’t have any better options and was probably just trying to get lucky. If he didn’t call at all, well, that-was obvious.
Porter’s call fell just inside the three-day mark. And an hour before, this also would have mattered to her.
Tibby,
Well, here are the Pants. I admit I didn’t exactly set the world on fire. I got scolded by my boss and watched a trendy fifty-year-old try to buy them. I hope you’ll do better.
Anyway, I don’t know what Camen told you, but I’m totally okay about Kostos and his new girlfriend. I was the one who broke up with him, remember?
Have fun with the Pants. I miss you. Call me later tonight if you are not out being cool and sophisticated with your cool and sophistcated new filmmaker friends.
Love,
Lena
You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
—E. L. Doctorow
Lena loved Carmen’s kitchen. It felt safe and contained, unlike the sprawling renovation at her house, with all its gleaming white and silver steel and too-bright halogen bulbs. Also, Lena loved the food Carmen’s kitchen had in it. It was all avocados and low-fat chips and herbal teas—girl stuff. None of the giant twelve-packs of beer and endless pork chops that jammed up the fridge at her house. There were so many fewer compromises in an apartment for two than in a house for four.
“Honey, would you like a glass of iced tea?”
Lena looked at Carmen’s mom. She appeared to be rearranging the pots in the lower cabinets. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and she looked like she was about twenty. Christina was always pretty, but Lena had never seen her look as animated and happy as she looked today.
“I’d love one,” Lena said.
Carmen was scanning the movie section of the newspaper. “I’ll have one too,” she said without looking up.
“How’s your mom?” Christina asked over the noise of the sink. She always asked this of Lena in a slightly guilty way, as if she were trying to pick up her dry cleaning without the ticket.
“She’s all right.”
“And how is your boyfriend? What’s his name?”
“Kostos,” Lena said reluctantly, never eager to discuss her love life. “But he’s not my boyfriend anymore. We broke up.”
“Ohhh. I’m sorry. Was the long-distance thing too hard?”
Lena liked that explanation. It was succinct and it didn’t necessarily make her sound like a lunatic. “Yes. Exactly.”
Christina took a full pitcher from the refrigerator. “Reminds me of your mother. She must know what you’re going through.”
Lena was bewildered. “We haven’t really talked about it.”
Christina didn’t seem to realize that not all mothers talked to their daughters about everything all the time.
“Anyway, I don’t think she knows anything about long-distance relationships,” Lena said.
Christina lined up three glasses. “Of course she does. She was with Eugene for at least four or five years.”
Lena looked doubtfully at Christina.
Christina and Lena’s mom hadn’t been close for a long time. Christina’s memory seemed to be getting jumbled, maybe on account of her own love affair.
“Who’s Eugene?”
Carmen had now torn herself from the movie section. She was looking back and forth from Lena to Christina.
“Who’s Eugene?” Christina repeated. The look on her face slowly transformed from surprise to uncertainty to anxiety.
“Uh …” She turned her back to the girls and poured the tea.
“Mama? Hello? Helloooooooo?”
Christina took a long time stirring in the sugar. When she turned back around, her face didn’t look open anymore. “Never mind. I might be mixed up. It was all a long time ago.”
Christina was a lovable, big-hearted, totally sweet person, but she was a bad actress and a horrible liar. Lena had believed she was mixed up before. Now she felt certain she wasn’t.
Carmen’s eyes were narrowed like laser beams on her mother’s face. “Never mind? Never mind? Are you joking?”
Christina cast a longing look at the door. “I’ve got to call Mimmy, honey. It’s already afternoon.”
“You’re not going to tell us?” Carmen looked as if she were ready to explode.
Christina’s eyes darted around nervously. “There’s nothing to tell. I was mistaken. I was thinking about someone else. It’s not important.” She snapped her mouth shut and left the kitchen in a hurry. She knew as well as anyone that Carmen didn’t let a person off the hook easily.
“It’s not important?” Lena echoed faintly.
Carmen looked at Lena knowingly. “That obviously means it is.”
“Who’s Eugene?”
Lena let it drop quietly between dinn
er and dessert as her mother loaded the plates into the dishwasher. Lena was clearing the table. It was just the two of them in the kitchen. Effie was at a friend’s, and their dad was reading the newspaper in the dining room.
“What?” Ari turned around.
“Who’s Eugene?”
Right away Lena knew she was causing a disturbance.
“Why are you asking me that?” Her mother was holding a plate in each hand.
“I just … want to know.”
“Who told you about him?”
“Nobody,” Lena said. If her mother wasn’t giving any information, then she didn’t feel like giving any either. Besides, she didn’t want to get Carmen’s mom in trouble.
Ari’s face took on a frustrated, unpolished look. She seemed to be calculating in a hurry. “Well, I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Then why are you whispering?”
Lena hadn’t meant to torture her mother, but that was how it was working out.
“I’m not,” she said, also in a whisper.
Lena stopped. This was feeling a little out of control. She wanted information, badly. The harder it was to get it, the more critical it seemed. On the other hand, the look on her mother’s face scared her a little.
Lena’s dad ambled into the kitchen. “How about some cheesecake?” he asked agreeably.
Lena’s mother cast her a look that said, in no uncertain terms, Do not open your mouth or I will ground you until you are an old woman.
“I’m going upstairs,” Lena informed the granite countertop.
“Nothing sweet?” her dad asked. They had a common love of dessert.
“Not tonight,” she said.
“Do you think Mom had a boyfriend before Dad?” she asked Effie when she appeared in Lena’s room awhile later.
“No. Nobody important.”
“What makes you so sure?” Lena asked.
“Because she would’ve told us about it,” Effie reasoned.
“Maybe not. She doesn’t tell us everything.”
Effie rolled her eyes. “Mom has a very boring life. Maybe there isn’t anything to tell.”