Alternate Side(62)

“Is that my jacket?” Nora said.

During high school Rachel had made criticizing her mother a hobby, especially in terms of appearance and apparel. Nora understood that what she wore fell into two categories as far as her daughter was concerned: things too lame to be allowed to pass without censure, and things that, in Rachel parlance, she could jack. Sometimes when Nora bought a blouse she could almost feel it slipping from her shopping bag directly into Rachel’s duffel. But it usually happened before the tags were even off the garment, before Nora had had a chance to actually wear it and, she had assumed, pollute it with her lameness.

“Technically, yes.”

“I’ve had that jacket forever,” Nora said. “Jenny picked that jacket out for me years ago.”

“See, and you never wear it anymore.” Which was not really true, but Nora suspected she might never wear it again. It looked good on Rachel, which would not have escaped Rachel’s notice. She wondered if Rachel had passed into her retro phase, in which she would take Nora’s things if they had somehow been sanctified by the passage of time and the boomerang nature of fashion trends. She and Jenny had marveled over a magazine piece that said the leather bomber jacket was “back.” “As if it ever went away,” Jenny had said disdainfully.

“So you’re really almost done with all your work?” Nora asked her daughter.

“It’s amazing how little there is second semester senior year,” Rachel said.

Nora remembered. It had given her endless hours to think about James and whether he would change his mind, which seemed pathetic to her now. Nora tucked her hair behind her ears.

“I’m glad you’re not blond,” Rachel said.

“What?”

“All my friends’ mothers get blonder the older they get. Or at least all my friends in the city. It’s like a gateway to gray, I guess. I saw Elizabeth’s mom last night, and she is totally blond. It looks weird.”

“Isn’t she Brazilian?”

“She says she’s from Venezuela. Is there a big difference?”

“In Brazil they speak Portuguese. In Venezuela I think they speak Spanish. I can’t imagine her blond, but she did have that unfortunate surgery when you were juniors.”

“Her face has kind of relaxed now,” Rachel said. “That’s another thing I’m glad you haven’t done.”

Bebe had once suggested that Nora’s forehead could use a little bit of a lift, and that the lines around her mouth might be made to vanish, but she’d ignored her. She figured it was like her professional ambition; she simply didn’t have that internal yearning for a smooth jawline or dewy skin that seemed to drive so many of the women she met. Part of it was Charlie. There were many uncertainties in her life, but Charlie’s carnal response to her continued unabated. When he was uninterested in sex, it was more about how he felt about himself than how he felt about Nora. If he was having a bad week he would watch her strip for a shower and say somewhat sadly, “Your butt still looks like a million bucks.”

“So, Mommy,” Rachel said after a moment of silence. “This might be a good time to discuss my plans for after graduation.” Oliver was already set with a job working as an assistant in the same lab where he had worked as a student. Nora had assumed Rachel would return to the city of her birth to pursue the kind of job that liberal arts graduates pursued, the kind that required their parents to pay their exorbitant rent for at least a year or two, even though they were living in tiny apartments designed for one person with two roommates and a temporary wall down the center of the bedroom.

“I’ve been offered a job by a great company in Seattle with excellent opportunities for advancement, and I’ve decided to take it,” Rachel said, so fast that the words blurred together, which, again, meant that there was more to this than her daughter was saying. Nora was silent for a minute or two. Then she stopped and looked at Rachel, and the fact that she had to look up at her, that her daughter was three inches taller than she was, combined with the strengthening wind, brought tears to her eyes.

“Oh, my God, don’t cry,” Rachel said. “It’s not that far. There are nonstop flights every day.”

Nora laughed. “It’s the wind,” she said. “And the fact that you’ve left out the most important part of this announcement, which is that you’re going to work for Christine, correct? And I just got off the phone with her and she didn’t say a word.”

“I wanted to tell you myself. Daddy’s going to kill me, isn’t he? Those nice people who used to live down the block from us, he used to say they were in the rag trade as though they were street peddlers or something, even though they were majorly rich.”

“He’ll be fine with it. It’s a great opportunity. I know you know this, but I thought the business was ridiculous when my sister first told me about it, which shows how bad I am at putting my finger on the future. Little did I know that someday people would be wearing yoga pants to work. Which, by the way, I still think is a terrible idea.”

“It’s just, I don’t know, all my friends from high school, most of my friends from college, they’re all coming to the city. Which, by the way, is kind of obnoxious, isn’t it, that we call it the city? There was a girl in my seminar from Paris, she said to me one day, ‘You know, Rachel, there are other cities in the world.’?”