I'd Give Anything(22)

It was something that would slip my mind for weeks, months. How, once, I had been a soaring, iridescent girl, a girl who loved the mystery of life, the potential in every moment to tip over into something else, you never knew what. How could it be that my mother, Adela Beale, had all these years held on to this truth about me?

Then, she said, “You went full tilt, didn’t you? Headlong into everything. You were something to see back then.”

You know when you’re little and it starts to snow, and you catch flakes like tiny stars on the dark sleeve of your jacket and they are amazing, and you don’t want to move or breathe?

Finally, I said, “Mom. I didn’t know you saw that in me. I thought you just thought I was wild. Careless.”

And then it was over. Her face went sharp again. She said with bite, “I don’t miss much. Careless, yes. I noticed that. And I also noticed when you started to be careful.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“What can I say? People change,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes they do. Sometimes, people go through a difficult time and they change.”

I flashed to the second half of my senior year in high school, my room with the blinds drawn, my body creaky as an old woman’s, my heart barren as the moon.

“That’s right,” I said.

“But then, after a time, if they have any backbone at all, if they’re not a complete invertebrate, they pull up their socks, find the part of themselves they misplaced, and take it back.”

I saw what was happening: my mother, controlling as ever, wanting to end the conversation on a classic hard-as-nails, acid-tongued Adela Beale note. Another day, what she’d said would have made me furious, but I smiled.

“I was something to see. You said that,” I teased.

My mother moved her hand in the manner of someone waving off a bad smell.

“That suitcase is heavy,” she said. “Don’t scuff the walls on your way down the stairs.”





Chapter Seven




August 24, 1997

Language has a way of turning ugly in my mother’s mouth. For instance, adjectives. She can take a perfectly decent, even complimentary word like “vivacious,” fill it with battery acid, and hurl it at a person, her own daughter, for instance, like a toxic water balloon, so that by the time it splatters all over her target, me, for instance, the word goes from meaning “effervescent” or “lively” to a synonym for some rancid, nonexistent word that means shallow, desperate, clownish, and tedious all at the same time.

It’s very clever on her part because if I get mad or hurt and accuse her of insulting me, she’ll say that she was not aware that “vivacious” is generally considered an insult and that I must be unusually “sensitive” to pick up on such a connotation. And then—if I don’t just shut my mouth and head the hell out of the room, if I let myself get sucked in, which I stupidly too often let myself get—it begins all over again with “sensitive.” It would almost be better if she just called me shallow, desperate, clownish, and tedious. Oh, wait. She does that, too.

Adela’s favorite words to throw at me are a whole slew of synonyms for the word “idealistic.” Quixotic, starry-eyed, romantic, hopeful, optimistic. Obviously, it takes a very special kind of person—and an even more special kind of mother—to turn “hopeful” into an insult, but without raising her voice or sneering or even showing any facial expression, God forbid, whatsoever, Adela pulls it off.

And mostly, I tell her or myself or Trev or Kirsten or CJ or Gray that she’s wrong. Dead, dead, dead wrong. That she’s a hardboiled, soulless, cynical, embittered wrong person. Because when you keep your expectations lofty and your eyes full of stars, the world rises to meet you and glows to dazzle you, and anyway, idealism is just plain brave. And the beauty of the universe belongs to the brave! It should and it must and it does. It does.

But there are moments, heart-sunk, throat-tight moments, when I get scared that she’s right.

Tonight, Gray and I had sex.

I’d wanted it for so long. To be honest, I’d wanted it before I fell in love with Gray, wanted it as an experience, the way I have always wanted to skydive. The newness. The daring. The letting go, letting go, letting go.

But I love Gray. So I wanted it like that and also differently. Specifically. Gray and the barbershop powder scent of his neck and the way the tendons move in his hands and his torso like a statue come to life. And his low laugh. And how certain he is when he throws a football or a rock across water or anything.

I wanted him so much. Wanted him sharply like pain and constantly like a drawn-out ache. Feverishly and also with slow concentration and calm certainty. From a distance and also so close up I couldn’t tell whose body was whose. All summer long, I wanted him like that.

Remember that myth about Tantalus? How the water receded before he could drink? How the fruit hung just out of his reach? Until all he could think about was coolness slipping down his throat, his teeth sinking into tart flesh, juice on his tongue. Tantalized is what I was, all summer long.

“I want you, too,” my sweet Gray would say, his breathing heavy. “I just want it to be right, the exact right moment.”

Then, tonight came.