Still Life with Tornado(39)

“Hi,” we say.

She freezes. She puts her fingertips to her chest. She squints. She frowns. She concentrates. She crosses her eyes. She scratches her head. She finds her way to the couch and sits down, still staring. We stand there.

“Sarah?” she asks.

We both nod.

I say, “Dad said she could come for dinner this week but I forget which day.”

“This—this is your—friend? From around the block?”

“Hi!” ten-year-old Sarah says with a wave. Same wave I have. Same wave we’ve always had. The circular fun wave.

“He said we were going to have tacos,” I say.

Ten-year-old Sarah says, “I love tacos!”

Mom is speechless.

“And I love movies!” ten-year-old Sarah adds. “Can we go, Sarah?”

“I need a nap,” I say.

Mom says, “I need a glass of water.”

I go to the kitchen and get a glass and get her some water out of the water cooler we have because of trihalomethanes. Philadelphia water has some history with trihalomethanes, and Mom avoids cancer when she’s not in the ER. Who doesn’t?

As the water glup-glup-glups from the cooler into the glass, I hear ten-year-old Sarah talking to Mom, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. When I come back into the living room, they are both sitting on the couch.

“We’re going to a movie!” ten-year-old Sarah says. “You can come with us. Or you can take that nap if you want.”

I look at Mom. “Isn’t that a little weird?” I look at ten-year-old Sarah. “Don’t you have to be home by dark?”

“I know who she is,” Mom says.

I don’t answer.

“How could I not recognize my own daughter?”

This is all happening too fast. And I’ve stopped thinking about how unoriginal everything is because this is original.

This is original.





MEXICO—Day Five I: Kids’ Club



We stood at the omelet station at the breakfast buffet—me, Dad, and Bruce. Mom preferred the Mexican yogurt and fresh fruit for breakfast. So far, none of us had contracted Montezuma’s Revenge and Mom trusted the fruit even though the guidebooks say to avoid the produce due to it being washed with tap water.

Dad and I had already ordered our omelets. Dad said, “Bruce, what do you want in yours?”

The cook stood waiting, but Bruce wouldn’t answer.

Dad said, “He’ll have the same as I’m having.”

When we left the omelet station with our plates full, Dad turned to Bruce and said, “What the hell is your problem?”

Bruce didn’t answer. This was not Bruce’s usual behavior. It was as if something were happening to Bruce in Mexico. I don’t know if it was the lying, the truth, the seaweed, or the shooting stars that changed him, but he was different on Day Five than he had been.

Dad bragged that he’d reserved two umbrellas on the beach. Up until Day Five, he’d only reserved one umbrella because Mom said it was rude to take up too much space with our rule-breaking. But Day Five he went all the way. He said, “I paid to come here and sit on the beach with my family.” He was talking like all the other selfish bastards at the resort now, except when he said my family he sounded like he owned us, not like he loved us.

Halfway through breakfast Bruce asked, “So what are we doing today?”

Mom didn’t answer because Dad was the vacation planner.

Dad didn’t answer because he was giving Bruce some payback in the not-talking department.

I said, “I want to swim, but then I want to do something else.”

“What else is there to do?” Mom asked.

“I saw on the daily newsletter that there’s a Ping-Pong tournament and stuff like that all afternoon. Games and a nature walk, too.”

“I didn’t come here to play Ping-Pong,” Dad said.

“Okay,” I said.

“There’s a kids’ club schedule at the main desk,” Mom said. “We’ll go look at it after breakfast, okay?”

She said that to me. But Dad acted like she said it to him. He said, “I don’t need to look at the f*cking kids’ club schedule. I’m not here for games.”

Mom said, “Why not let them go and have fun?” I wanted to tell her that the kids’ club was for little kids, not for me and Bruce, but I kept quiet.

Dad looked at Bruce. Bruce was pushing his food around on his plate.

“It’s not up to you, Helen,” Dad said. He was acting so cranky, we all just stared at him while he shoved his omelet into his mouth and washed it down with the watered-down orange juice they were passing off as fresh-squeezed when anyone with taste buds could tell it was mixed from powder.

Mom got up and I got up and Bruce got up. We all went to look at the kids’ club activity schedule for the day.

Mom and Bruce had a conversation while I asked a balloon man in the lobby to make me a dolphin. When I came back with my balloon dolphin, Mom said, “Okay?” to Bruce. Bruce said, “Okay,” to Mom and then they hugged.

They both made a big deal out of my balloon dolphin.

When Mom headed back to the room, she looked at Bruce and said, “Ten minutes?”

He said, “Okay.”