In that way, Bitch reminds me of you. I wish I could fully embrace your utilitarian philosophy about clothes: You have to wear clothes. So you wear them. Like you, I don’t want to be bothered by clothes, and more specifically, shopping for clothes. I also resent being judged by the quality, creativity, or cost of my clothes. It’s all so superficial, right? And didn’t we learn about focusing on our insides not our outsides in the “Can’t Buy Love at the Mall” self-esteem workshop in middle school? But here’s the major difference: You borrow one of my T-shirts and don’t even notice or care when it exposes the hairy expanse of your midriff like a hoochie drag queen in the Gay Pride Parade. Yet the look still works on you. It contributes to your freaky mystique. I believe your whole not-caring-about-clothes thing is sincere, but it also has the added benefit of enhancing your image, not detracting from it.
A similar sartorial carelessness doesn’t look so good on me because, in truth, I still care too much about how I look. The problem is, I don’t care enough to do much about it, despite my mother’s, my sister’s, and my trendier friends’ best efforts. Which is why I often end up wearing clothes that make me look pregnant. In a variation of that classic song by the Clash, I’m “Vain in Vain.” This is why Bitch and Slut mostly ignore me whenever I’m here visiting my parents. Sometimes they cast withering glances over their shoulders in my general direction. Other times they heave sighs and lungfuls of tobacco smoke. I was written off as a hopeless loser the first time I was caught watering my parents’ plants in my nondesigner cutoffs, nondescript T, and busted Chucks. My only redeeming quality was that I had somehow managed to seduce you.
Manda just argued that no human being could out-hubris a teenage boy, a strange assertion from the former most popular girl in the sophomore class. I swear Bitch and Slut have the boys beat. As the reigning most popular girls in their class, they can outfreeze anyone with an icy stare, or a crackly cackle of laughter. And even if they cannot ensnare their quarry (you, for example), they still think they can, which is close enough.
Whenever I gaze upon these girls—girls shimmering with the power of their sexuality, girls I would have hated when I was their age, girls I have to will myself not to hate right now—I am certain that even if I could fulfill that aphorism about going back knowing what I know now, I still wouldn’t fit into the caste Hope and I coined the Upper Crust. To play off that UK economist’s dire prognosticatians, I am, comparatively speaking, doomed to the Under Crust. I’d never be cool enough, pretty enough, or, most important, innovative enough in the art of adolescent sadism. At sixteen, I would have instinctively crossed the street if these superior specimens were headed in my direction. And though I’m ashamed to admit it, part of me still wants to avoid them now, even though one of the divine advantages of being twenty-two is that I don’t have to surrender to the oppressive, ever-shifting politics of high school popularity.
I watched Bitch and Slut hastily put away their contraband, giggling as they galloped toward a honk coming from the front of the condo. I couldn’t confirm this from my spot in the window, but I imagined that it was Bitch’s boyfriend, a senior, perhaps, who had just rolled up in the driveway in his SUV. It was 6:58 A.M., and if Boyfriend leadfooted it, he would get them to homeroom in time for the last bell. As they sped away in a screech of peeling tires, I asked myself why I was so bound by relationships forged during the zitgeist, the time of teen angst I couldn’t wait to escape, and to which I wouldn’t return even if I could.
fifty-eight
Without getting too gross and Oedipal, joining my dad at breakfast was kind of like seeing last night’s one-night stand in the harsh, morning-after light. His candor had made him emotionally vulnerable, and so I was fully expecting him to return to the defensive subterfuge that has pretty much defined our relationship thus far.
“Good morning,” he said casually as he came down the stairs.
“There is no news in this newspaper,” I said, leaning into my elbows as I scanned the front-page headlines of the Ocean County Observer. (RARE TURTLE “NUKED” AT POWER PLANT; OCEAN-MONMOUTH GIRL SCOUTS MERGE; LOCAL YOUTHS HEAD BACK TO SCHOOL IN STYLE.) “No wonder so many people are moving to Pineville. It’s downright Utopian….”
“If you want to get depressed over breakfast, then go back to New York Times territory,” my dad sniped.
“I don’t want to get depressed, I just want—” I had looked up to see that my dad was dressed in his cycling gear. “Dad!”
“What?”
“What?!”
“I’m fine,” he said, waving his hand as if to shoo away a mosquito. “Gotta get back on the bike. Can’t let one setback stop me.”
“Okay,” I said. “But don’t you think you should take it easy today?”
“I am taking it easy,” he replied. “It’s almost nine A.M. Normally I’ve done twenty miles by now.”
“It’s just…,” I began.
He came over and poked his finger in the wrinkle that always worries itself between my eyes. (Again, at the risk of getting too Freudian, I remember you doing the same thing, warning me about the permanent mark I was creating through all my “face-making.”)
“I’m touched by your concern,” he said. “And it meant a lot to me that you came out here to see your old man in the hospital. But I’m fine. And I promised to meet the guys from the club….”
“Okay,” I said, wondering if I should so much as acknowledge how much last night meant to me. I didn’t have to wonder for long.
“I enjoyed our conversation last night, though I’m afraid I’m not much of a storyteller.” He thrusted his chin as he clicked the strap on his helmet. “That talent must have skipped a generation.”
“You weren’t too boring,” I said, keeping it light. “I kept asking questions.”
A smile softened his hard-boiled face. “Ah, Jessie,” he said, taking my face in his wrist-guarded hands. “You’ve always had more questions than I’ve had answers.”
And before I got a chance to get all sentimental, he handed me an unopened jar of Skippy peanut butter. I mention the brand only because buying nongeneric is a luxury to me.
“I give you permission to take this home with you,” he said. “And you can have the whole-wheat pasta, and the Cap’n Crunch that I bought for you, anyway. And I think there’s a small box of laundry detergent….”
“Uh, okay….”
“This way you aren’t stealing from us.”
I was so mortified that I couldn’t even muster a denial. I did indeed ransack their pantry the last time I visited. But I only took items that they had in excess, that I thought they wouldn’t miss.
“It’s okay,” my dad said, handing me a few rolls of toilet paper. (Charmin! My ass will be so happy!) “Just ask next time. Don’t ever feel like you can’t ask us for help.”
He was almost at the door when I had a flash of insight, of inspiration.
“Hey, Dad!”
“Yeah?”
“Darling’s Designs for Leaving needs a website,” I said, slightly overzealous. “You should totally design it for Mom.”
“You think?” he asked, stroking his helmet in consideration.
“She’d appreciate your help.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “Thanks, Notso Darling.”
And with those parting words and a smile, he was off on another two-wheeled adventure.
Not a minute later, my mom came downstairs, fully coiffed, made up, and dressed in an embroidered linen tunic over caramel-colored pants. I must admit, she looked pretty great. Polyurethaned, but pretty great.
“Dad just left,” I said. “On his bike.” I waited for her to express concern, verbally if not facially.
“Typical,” she muttered. “So what time are you going back today?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think the buses leave every hour….”
“Are you ready to go right now?” she asked. “I can take you right now. Otherwise, unless your father breaks tradi
tion and comes home early, you’ll have to wait until this afternoon.”
My mom was tapping her keys against the countertop. She had somewhere more important to be. I felt like an unwelcome distraction.
“Give me five minutes to get dressed and brush my teeth,” I said, already headed to the bathroom.
“Okay,” she said, grabbing her bag as she headed to the garage.
It didn’t occur to me until my mouth was rabid with toothpaste that I hadn’t even thought to mention her shotgun wedding. More significant, my mom hadn’t grilled me in such a manner that would have revealed the content of last night’s conversation. Nor was there an intense investigation to uncover your proposal, Bethany’s request for legal guardianship, my bombed job interview, the awkwardness with Hope, Bridget and Percy’s wedding deferment, Manda and Shea’s breakup, Scotty and Sara’s baby, even the crack-of-dawn pot-smoking girls next door. Back in the day, she would have interrogated me on these topics without even extending me the courtesy of a “Good morning!” But my mother had shown not one iota of interest in my life, nor in the lives of those who overlap it. For years, I had made fun of my mother for living for such gossip, living through me. But her indifference made clear to me this morning what must have dawned on Dad months ago: She was living just fine without me.
Though my father had done the talking last night, I had learned so much more about my mother. She had missed out on the sixties sexual revolution because she was faithful to my father. She missed out on all the bra-burning fun in the 1970s because she got pregnant and married…in that order. She missed the working-girl eighties because her baby boy—of whom she has never spoken—succumbed to SIDS. Then she had me and devoted herself to the helicopter-parenting style of the nineties. Only now, in the 2000s, as a hot-flashing fiftysomething, is she living an uncompromised life. I’d be unabashedly supportive of her late-midlife liberation if it weren’t for its most unfortunate consequence:
My father, left behind. On his bike. Blindsided, bewildered, bereft.
She honked impatiently in the driveway. I sprinted down the stairs, grabbing my overnight bag with one hand and the shopping bag filled with supplies in the other. I made it to the SUV’s door just before she took off without me.
“Jeez, Mom,” I said, still buckling my seat belt as she backed out.
“There’s a lot of traffic at this hour,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how congested Route 9 can get.”
Usually I couldn’t think of anything to say to my mother. Today I had too much to say, but no right place to begin.
“Well, I’m in no rush,” I replied. “I don’t have anywhere to be until tonight.” I waited for her to ask me what I was doing tonight, but she was too busy honking her horn at the Prius that was going five miles below the speed limit. “I’m going to this, uh, karaoke party benefit thing with my friend Dexy from Columbia.”
“Oh, to be twenty-two years old and so unfettered,” she breathily singsonged. “All that freedom….”
Normally I would have spat back a snotty response about how I’m plenty fettered, but in light of my last night’s revelation about how completely fettered she was at my age, I held my tongue. “But when you have freedom you want security,” I said. “It’s the dichotomy of desire.”
“The what?” My mom’s face would have wrinkled if it were capable. “Jessie, you think too much.”
How many times have I heard that this week?
“You know, Mom, there are some people who look forward to their retirement years so they can be so unfettered,” I argued. “Being twenty-two isn’t all that great. You’re romanticizing my age because…” Because when you were twenty-two, you were already a wife and mother. I stopped myself.
“You can say it.”
“Say what?” I asked innocently.
“I know your father told you that I was pregnant with Bethany when we got married.”
If I had been driving, the car would have screeched to a dramatic halt. But my mother was behind the wheel, so we continued to gas-break our way down Route 9.
“Dad told you? When? After he went to bed?”
“Contrary to what you believe, Jessie, your father and I do talk to each other.” The SUV stopped at a red light and she turned to look at me. “I think you need to explain why you never mentioned Marcus’s proposal.”
I shrunk in my seat. “Dad told you that, too?”
“Obviously.”
“I didn’t tell you,” I said, “because I wasn’t sure what to do about it.”
I still don’t.
“How do you feel about Marcus?” my mom asked.
“I love him,” I replied. “How do you feel about Marcus?”
My mom tapped the steering wheel with her palm. “I think he is shaping up to be a fine man.”
“And?”
“It really seems like he’s getting his act together. It says a lot about a man’s character to overcome addictions. And it showed real initiative for him to apply to Princeton.”
I pressed my hands to my mouth in amazement. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Dad said the exact same thing.”
“Really?”
“Like the exact same words.”
“Hmm,” she said, nonplussed. “I also think that if I try to tell you what to do, you’ll do the opposite. And if I try reverse psychology, you’ll outsmart me. Do you, by chance, remember that punk kid Bethany dated in high school?”
I couldn’t believe it. The conversation was following the same pattern as the one I’d had with my dad two weeks ago. My parents certainly had their differences, but after thirty-four years together, they worked as opposite sides of the same brain.
“When does Marcus get back from his Orientation program?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
My mom considered this but said nothing more on the subject.
“Do you ever think about leaving Dad?” I blurted.
My mom was unruffled by this outburst. “You can’t be together as long as we have and not think about it, Jessie.”
“But are you more than thinking about it?” I asked. “Because—”
“Because Bethany has seen the Signs?” She said the last two words derisively.
“She told you about that?”
“Of course she did,” my mother said. “She tells me everything. She even told me that she asked you to be Marin’s legal guardian.”
And here I was, all this time thinking that the Blonde Bond had been broken.
“Have you given her an answer at least?” she asked.
“Not yet.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to make commitments I can’t keep.”
Mom pursed her lips and hummed, as if her unspoken words were darting around the inside of her mouth.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s the problem with your generation. No commitment. Taking responsibility for Marin would mean the end of your carefree lifestyle.”
I took offense. “My life is not carefree….”
“Yes it is. Carefree. Free of care. Young people today want to keep their options open just in case a better opportunity comes along.”
“That’s not true….”
“You’ve got a temporary job, a temporary apartment,” my mom said. “How can you care about anything when you treat everything like it’s only temporary?”
I opened my mouth to protest the obvious: Everything is only temporary. She lectured on.
“None of you seem to be in any hurry to grow up….”
My mom’s comment shed light on one of the most peculiar paradoxes of living here. New York City is the mythical realm of possibilities, where young people venture to do big things and make their mark on the world. And yet, in many ways, this city infantilizes the very people who are looking to do such big and important and mark-on-the-world things. Why grow up when you can outsource just about any “adult” responsibility you can think of? Why drive when you can take the subway? Why coo
k when you can get cheap takeout? Why learn how to fix the clogged toilet when it’s the landlord’s job? Why grocery shop when there’s Fresh Direct? Why trust your own intuition when you find love while waiting in line for the restroom when you can pay iLoveULab to scan your brain and analyze your instincts for you…?
“And I don’t want you to think I’m picking on you,” Mom said. “From what I hear, it sounds like your friends are even worse.”
I leaned back into the seat and closed my eyes to the maligning of an entire generation.
“Your roommate can’t decide if she’s gay or straight. And just look at Sara. She lives with Scotty, the father of her child, but has no plans to marry….”
“Actually, she does have p—” I began, before stopping myself. I refused to use Sara’s psychotic wedding stratagem as proof that our generation could stay focused on a goal, could, for example, go ahead and organize a lavish wedding without letting anything stand in our way, not even, say, the lack of a willing, would-be groom, because that’s what it means to make a decision and stick to it, goddammit!
“And what about Bridget and Percy?” she asked. “They’ve been engaged for a year. What are they waiting for?”
“Actually,” I began again, “Bridget and Percy are waiting until marriage is legal for gays….”
My mom snorted. “Oh, they’re just spinning their wheels with that kind of talk….”