Big Summer(33)
In Drue’s living room, I looked over my shoulder to make sure Brett was still occupied and that he hadn’t seen me. Drue was staring at me. I realized I’d never answered her question. “No,” I said. “I thought I knew that guy, but he just reminded me of someone else. Bad first date.”
She made sympathetic noises and patted my arm, until her mother called for her imperiously. I carried my water to the window, where I stood, breathing slowly, trying to collect myself, wondering what it was about this apartment, this party, these people, that had me so on edge. Even before Brett’s arrival, I’d felt unhappy and off-balance. Was it Drue, and being back in her presence after all these years? Was it that she was getting married and I was still single? Or that she was so beautiful, and I… was beautiful in a different way, I made myself say in my head. I took another sip of water, another deep breath. I looked out the window, down at the street, and finally, it clicked. I could forgive myself for not seeing it immediately. The block had changed. Once, there’d been a Catholic church, a gloomy pile of foreboding brownstone. There’d been a bodega on the corner, with a wig shop and a nail salon next door. The church hosted Weight Watchers meetings in its basement, and I’d been here before, almost twenty years ago, the summer of Nana.
* * *
The Lathrop School paid well, but not so well that my parents didn’t need to look for summer jobs. The year that I was six, they’d both gotten hired at an overnight camp in Maine. My dad would be the aquatics director, teaching kids how to kayak and canoe. (“Do you know how to kayak and canoe?” I’d asked, and my father, who’d grown up in Brooklyn, had smiled and said, “I’ll learn.”) While he was on the water, Mom would run the arts and crafts program. They’d get room and board, a private cabin, and generous salaries. The only problem was, I wasn’t old enough to attend as a camper, or to be left in their cabin by myself. So they invited my mother’s mother to come down from Connecticut and stay with me in New York.
“Daphne and I will have a wonderful time!” Nana had said. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell my parents that Nana scared me. Where my mom and my Bubbe, my father’s mother, were soft and warm and smelled good, Nana was sharp-edged and skinny, and had stale coffee breath and none of my mother’s gentle ways or affinity for baked goods. Her gray hair was clipped short, and her eyes, magnified by her reading glasses, looked like a pair of poached eggs. My mom wore brightly colored, loose-fitting clothes: blousy tops, long skirts with hems that draped the floor, or smocks with pockets full of tape and buttons, bits of trim, a pair of earrings and her house keys, pennies and butterscotch candies. Bubbe carried a giant New Yorker tote bag, with a rattling keychain and her phone and its charger and whatever library book she was reading, a backup library book in case she finished that one, and a squashed peanut-butter-and-apricot-jam sandwich, in case she or I got hungry. Nana wore spotless white blouses and crisply pressed black pants with no pockets. She carried a small, immaculate purse.
Before Nana arrived, my mother sat down with me on my bed. “Nana loves you,” she began. “You know that, right?”
I nodded, thinking that if someone really loved you, you didn’t need to be told. Nana sent me presents for Chanukah and my birthday, and kissed my cheek and hugged me hello when she saw me and goodbye when she left, but the hugs and the gifts felt like acts of obligation. I didn’t think I was the kind of granddaughter Nana had hoped for, a small, neat, pretty girl to take to The Nutcracker or for tea at the Plaza. That summer, my hair hung halfway to my waist and was frequently tangled. I had scabby elbows and skinned knees, and I was tall for my age, and round, like my parents. Nana didn’t seem to actually enjoy having me around, the way Bubbe did, when we’d visit her in Arizona or she’d come for the holidays. Bubbe kept a special stepstool in her kitchen just for me to use when I was there, and she let me sleep in her big bed at night.
My mother had pulled me against her. “If you miss us… or if Nana does something that makes you feel bad…”
I kept quiet, watching as my mom pulled a pink square of paper out of her pocket and used a thumbtack to affix it to the center of the corkboard over my desk, a board normally filled with my paintings and drawings. “This is our number,” she said. Her voice had softened, and she sounded more like herself. “We’ll call you every night. But you can call us if you need us. Anytime. No matter what.”
The next morning, Nana arrived, pulling a black suitcase and wearing a pair of gold knot-shaped earrings and a bracelet of gold links around her wrist. Her fingernails were freshly manicured, salmon-pink ovals that were pointy at the top. “Daphne!” she said, forming a smile shape with her mouth. Nana hugged me and kept one arm tight around me as, with the other, she waved my parents out the door. “Don’t worry about a thing. Daphne and I are going to have a wonderful time!” I stood at the window, watching as my parents piled their duffel bags and a tote bag filled with all of the New Yorkers my dad planned to read into the trunk of the car. My father slammed the trunk. My mother blew one last kiss. Then they pulled away from the curb and made their way up Riverside Drive toward the Henry Hudson Parkway. I could see my mom’s hand sticking out of the window, waving at me, until they turned a corner and were out of sight. And then Nana and I were alone.
Nana looked me over. Her voice was bright, but her body was stiff. “We’re going to make some changes here,” she said, and bent down to the cupboard beneath the sink, pulling out a trash bag. As I watched, she opened the refrigerator and tossed into the bag a loaf of white bread, a container of sour cream, three sticks of butter, and the Tupperware container half-full of chocolate-chip cookie dough (sometimes, my mother would bake two cookies for each of us after dinner, and other times she’d allow me to have a spoonful of dough for dessert). The remainder of a half-gallon of orange juice went down the drain, followed by the half-and-half.