Future Perfect (23 page)

A
t work I am not an incoming Harvard student or a weight-loss surgery patient. I am a server and I am not thinking, I am filling up bread baskets and spending a lot of time explaining the special, which is Manhattan clam chowder and seems to worry quite a lot of people because it doesn't sound like clam chowder to them and they're not sure they can trust us anymore after all these years, since we seem to have gone off the rails in unpredictable ways and the world isn't a safe place for anyone, anymore.

“I just don't understand how anyone can call that chowder with a clear conscience,” Mrs. Monroe is saying as she loads the last of her sourdough into her giant black purse.

“Well, I think chowder is a blanket term that covers a basic kind of fish soup,” I say, “which offers lots of opportunity for experimentation—”

“That's exactly right,” she says to me. “It's the experimental stuff that gets you in trouble. You have to stick with the classics.”

Mrs. Monroe's new girlfriend Sadie says, “I don't know. I'm always up for adventure.” She winks at me and I tamp down the urge to ask her not to do that. I smile at her instead. I hope it's a real enough smile.

“Well, maybe you can try it next time,” I say.

“Sadie, don't you dare,” Mrs. Monroe says, taking her arm.

“It'll be good for us, Martha,” Sadie says as they slide their chairs back. “I'm going to be dead soon enough. I can't keep always doing the safe things.”

I hope we're still talking about soup,
I think.

Mrs. Monroe shakes her head and Sadie says, “You have a good night now,” to me, and I look up to see my father standing outside on the deck, staring out at the lighthouse. My phone says I still have another hour of my shift, so I go to the pass-through instead, out the back way, and make my way around my tables, making sure every one is covered.

“How's Laura, honey?” one of Laura's regulars asks me. “I haven't seen her in a while. Her dad and mom either.”

“Stepmom,” I say automatically, just like Laura would. I miss her. I have spent my whole shift expecting to look up and see her standing at a customer's elbow, making them laugh as she points something out on the menu and offers sage and serious advice about the difference between various types of whitefish. I've spent the whole shift waiting for her to text me. About Harvard. About weight-loss surgery. But my phone stays dark.

“Right,” he says. He is a deeply tanned and deeply wrinkled white guy and very blond. “She doing okay?”

“I think so,” I say. “I'm going to talk to her later. I'll tell her you were asking about her.” I glance up. My father isn't on the deck anymore.

In the pass-through, Nancy peers out of the kitchen. “How are they liking the chowder?” she says. She wipes her forehead with the back of her wrist.

“They are very confused by it,” I say, pulling my phone out.

“Good, good,” she says. “I'll have the next order up in a jiff. Wait right there.”

I pull my phone out and text Laura. I type,
MISS YOU
, and send it and put the phone away when another two bowls are up.

When I come back onto the floor, my father is lingering by the hostess stand. For a minute I forget where I'm supposed to drop the soup, until I see the Tams' expectant faces.

“It's red,” Mrs. Tam says when I set it down.

“This isn't chowder!” Mr. Tam says. He seems to regret venturing out of the house more than usual.

“It's Manhattan clam chowder,” I say. “It's a variety. Like chardonnay is a variety of wine.”

“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Tam says, and picks up her spoon. “Pick up your spoon, Frank.”

My father is looking at the giant fiberglass swordfish on the wall like he's never noticed it before, and I suppose that's possible.
He says, “I thought Moby Dick was a whale,” when I hurry up to him.

“Why are you here?” I say. Then it occurs to me in a rush. “Is everything okay? Is Grandmother okay?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” he says. He pulls me into a hug, levers me up off my feet. “You got into Harvard!”

“I'm still working,” I say when I land with a huff. “I have another forty-five minutes.” I glance back at the dining room to make sure that no one is trying to get my attention.

“Can I sit down?” he says.

“Where are the dogs?” I say. “They're not tied up outside, are they?”

“No,” he says. “I brought them back home.”

I grab a menu from the rack next to the hostess stand and say, “Follow me.” I lead him over to the table by the window. “Can I get you anything to drink besides water?” I say.

“So professional!” he says.

“I'm working,” I say. “The specials are on the inside cover. I'll be back in a couple of minutes to take your order.”

There's only so long I can hide in the pass-through rolling silverware into napkins. When I poke my head out, my father is staring out the window with his chin in his hand.

“Have you decided?” I say.

“I'm going to live a little,” he says.

“Don't you always live at least a little? I mean, if not, we'll
have to fit you for a coffin.”

“Ha ha! Touché!” he says.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“Pick something for me,” he says. “I trust your judgment. You're a Harvard girl.” He shoves the menu over to me and is trying to make really significant eye contact.

“Great,” I say. I check my phone when I'm in the back. Laura has written,
I MISS U 2
.
B BACK SOON
. I want to tell her that I'm getting surgery after all, despite all my pronouncements. But I don't know what to say. I stand in the pass-through just staring at my phone until Amy hip-checks me as she stomps by.

“Wake up,” she says, and I shove my phone back into my pocket.

When I come back to my father's table with Manhattan clam chowder and a basket of bread, I see he's shredded his coaster into bits of confetti. He doesn't look at the bowl when I set it down. I say, “Can I get you anything else?” and he says, “I'm worried about you, Ashley.”

“What happened to ‘Hooray for Harvard'?”

“You know what I want to talk about.”

“This is a really bad time, Dad,” I say, and turn to go.

“I do trust your judgment,” he says. “But I don't trust your grandmother.”

I swing back around. “She's taken care of us since Mom left. She's done everything for us! We wouldn't have a place to live.
The twins wouldn't be able to go to college. You'd have to get a real job.”

“I have a real job,” he snaps.

“When was the last time you sold a house?” I hiss.

“Recently,” he says. “It's not really what I meant to do.”

“Real estate, or being a grown-up?” I ask.

He looks down at the mess of confetti in front of him and sweeps it up into a pile.

“Is that why Mom left? Because I can see why she wouldn't want to spend her whole life taking care of you.”

“Your mother left because I didn't stand up for her,” he says. “She left because your grandmother—”

“Tried to help her. How terrible.”

“Tried to do to your mother what she's doing to my daughter right now.”

This stops me. I feel the tears in my eyes and I stomp away, taking deep breaths.

“Are you okay?” Mrs. Tam says, reaching her hand out to me as I pass their table.

“The soup is really good after all,” Mr. Tam says soothingly.

That is not as comforting as they mean it to be.

My father sits at his table for the rest of my shift, looking out the window and ignoring his chowder. I close out all my tabs and I
fill Amy in on everything that's left to do. I go sit at my father's table. It's gotten dark out, so the lighthouse is lit up with red and green bulbs, because Christmas comes sooner every year.

“Are you ready?” I say.

“I thought you'd leave without me,” he says.

“I'm not vindictive,” I say. “That's not the sort of thing I would do to you.”

He nods. “I know,” he says.

We don't stand, and I'm glad. My back aches and my feet hurt and I am tired.

“You're right. Your grandmother gave you everything,” he says, looking at his hands.

“Yes,” I say. I rest my chin on my hand. I feel my eyes closing.

“You don't have to give her everything in return,” he says. His words echo around behind my closed lids, in the dark of my head.

“I'm leaving when you leave for college,” he says.

I sit up. “What? Why would you do that?”

“I don't want to owe her anything more,” he says. “I don't want
you
to owe her anything for supporting me.”

“I don't . . . It's just . . .” I stutter and stumble over my words. In the end, I give up trying to get them out.

“Let's go home,” he says, pushing his chair back.

We walk in silence down the pier and onto our back roads,
where the streetlights are spaced far apart. It's not a long walk, but this is the longest it has ever felt.

“I'm sorry,” he says, when we get to the start of our street.

“For what?” I say. I stop, but he keeps walking ahead of me.

“I would have done anything for you when your mother left,” he says when I catch up. “But I couldn't.”

The familiar exasperation wells up in me. “You mean like the way you
can't
mow the lawn.”

A silence stretches out between us, and then my father speaks. “Your grandmother found me on the floor in the bathroom. I couldn't live without your mother. And I thought you kids didn't deserve to have a father like me. A father who didn't stand up for her.”

It's a moment before I realize what he is saying, but then—

“Oh god, Dad,” I whisper, but he keeps walking slowly ahead. I lunge forward to clutch at his sleeve to make him stop. “Dad.” He looks at me, and I fumble for something to say. “I didn't know.”

He smiles. “Stop feeling sorry for
me
, Ashley,” he says. “You took care of your older brothers and you took care of me and now you're taking care of your grandmother. You're the one who works to make her happy. You're the one who takes on everything she gives you.”

“No. She—she gave us everything,” I say again stubbornly.

“That shouldn't have been your job,” he finishes. He hugs me then, and I realize I'm almost as tall as he is. I let him hug me as long as he wants and I hug him back.

“Don't do it,” he says. He's hugging me tighter. “Don't get weight-loss surgery. Don't do it, Ashley, you don't need to do it.”

I pull back. “You don't understand at all,” I say.

“You don't have to do anything,” he says. “Well, except die eventually.”

“Oh, that's comforting.”

“Why do you need to be different from how you are now?”

I try to call up all of my grandmother's reasoning—the words that sound so sure, so logical. I reach for them, but they fade away. The sound of waves crashes behind us, churning up the sand.

“It's more complicated than you think,” I say. I can hear the pleading in my voice. “I have to do this.”

“You can do anything, baby. I've seen it. Anything you want. Just make sure it's what you want to do.”

I am pleased when my voice comes out sounding casual. Worry free. “You sound like an inspirational Facebook post,” I say. “I don't like it when you're sincere.”

“I'm not Sincere,” he says. “I'm Dad, nice to meet you.” He holds out his hand to me.

“No,” I say.

“That's my girl.” He smiles.

“What do you want to do about dinner?” I ask.

“Eat it,” my father says, and I punch him in the arm.

We walk the rest of the way home in silence.

I
have spent so much of my life pretending that it is easy to act as if everything is going to plan. That I am excited about Harvard, my inevitably bright and fantastically successful future, that I had a real, deep change of heart and know that weight-loss surgery is the right choice for me.

But the pre-surgical appointment does not go well. “I don't want to take a laxative,” I tell the doctor. I'm sitting at the edge of the exam table and my back is cold because this gown is too small. You'd think they'd have larger gowns for all their bariatric surgery patients.

She doesn't look up from her checklist. “Well, you have to.”

“Are there any alternatives?”

“No, there are not. Laxatives. Nothing but ice water for twenty-four hours. You are going to have to cooperate or this surgery will be dangerous.” She looks at me now. “Frankly I'm concerned about your compliance.”

“I signed the papers,” I say. I initialed over and over again in the waiting room while my grandmother watched. Scrawling AMP next to words like
pulmonary embolism
and
gastrointestinal tract leak
and
death
. “My grandmother says it's safe.”

“Yes,” Dr. Alvarez says. “But are you ready for this?”

“No,” I say. “Of course I'm not.”

Her face changes—she's less annoyed at me now. She's feeling sorry for me. She pats my knee, and her hand is cold. “It'll be okay,” she says, instead of the medical jargon I'm expecting about
.05 error and complication rates
.

“Everyone keeps telling me that,” I say.

She flips through the papers on her checklist. “We're going to take good care of you. You just have to take good care of yourself.” She hands me the clipboard and a pen. “Sign here at the bottom.”

I'm promising to do everything she tells me. Give myself diarrhea and drink only water and shower in the morning but don't put on any lotion, or deodorant, or perfume, or jewelry. Show up at the hospital at six in the morning and let them stick me with needles.

“This is serious,” I had told my grandmother, looking up from the sheaf of papers I was initialing.

“Of course it is, darling,” she said, not looking up from her book.

If I don't open my mouth, I won't say anything I regret. I nod when my grandmother talks to me. We are staying at a hotel in town because my grandmother does not want to drive two hours before dawn. I go to bed early, but I am up often, sitting in the bathroom in the dark with my head on my knees.

She wakes me up at four, and I stand in the shower for a long time, until she knocks on the door. I look down at my body, which feels hollowed out and empty. But it still belongs to me. I haven't turned it over yet.

I know every part of it. The scars on my knee from crashing into the net frame during practice, the muscles in my thighs that jump and twitch when I've run too far, my belly, which is soft and curved, and the width of my hips and the size of my breasts and the strength in my arms. I wipe the steam from the mirror and rub the towel over my face, squeeze the water out of my hair. My DNA pendant is glinting at my throat and I remember my pre-surgery instructions. I reach behind my neck, unclasp it, and let it fall into a puddle in my hand. I put it on the shelf above the sink, touch my chest. It feels empty without my necklace. It looks naked and blank. I breathe in, breathe out. Watch my bare chest rise and fall.

“Ashley,” grandmother calls, and I come out in my towel. She's bought me comfortable clothes to wear, a pair of soft jersey pajamas in a ruby red that makes my skin glow dark and gold. She hands me a cup of ice water and points at my slippers.

At the hospital, she knows what to do. She ushers us through check-in, to the waiting room, through the doors with the beds separated by curtains. A young orderly with his hair covered hands me two gowns, one for my front and one for my back. He looks like some white kid playing dress-up. “You'll stay warm that way,” he says. He can see that I am shivering. “I'll be right back,” he says.

My grandmother takes a seat next to the bed in a small plastic chair. Her hair is pulled back and I realize she's not wearing any makeup, not even lip gloss. She takes my hand. “Don't be nervous, darling.” She pats my hand with her other. “It'll all be over quickly.”

I reach up to touch my pendant, but it's gone. I place my hand flat against that empty space on my chest, where I can feel my heart beating behind my breastbone, a little too quickly. A little too hard.

The orderly comes back with a warm blanket and a rolling pole with an IV bag hanging from it. He tucks the blanket around my legs and pats my ankle. “Now which hand is your dominant one?” he says.

“My left,” I say.

“Hold out your right arm for me then,” he says. “Let's see what kind of veins you've got here.”

“No,” I say. I keep my hand against my chest. Heart thumping.

“The left one then,” he says. “But it'll be less comfortable
once you're up and moving around.”

“No!” I say louder.

My grandmother stands up. “Could you excuse us for a moment, please?” She smiles at him as she herds him out of the room and whips the curtain shut behind him. “Stop being unreasonable, Ashley,” Grandmother says. “I know you're nervous but I've told you a thousand times you're going to be just fine.” Her voice switches to soothing tones. “You know what this means. You are going to Harvard, darling. You told them yourself. You're going to change the world, isn't that right?”

“I told them that,” I say. “But I lied.”

“It wasn't a lie,” she says, her voice sharpening again.

“It was,” I say. “The surgery part was. I'll change the world some other way.”

Grandmother laughs. “So, then, you're just going to give up Harvard?”

I think of the photo of my mother sitting on the lawn, those huge columns and that smile on her face. I wonder what her dreams were—what she gave up for us, to move to California, to live in my grandmother's house.

“Yes,” I say. “I give that up.”

“You're joking,” Grandmother says.

I stand up from the bed. The orderly says, “Knock knock!” and I pull the curtain aside. “Excuse me,” I say, and shoulder my way around him.

Grandmother snatches up her purse and storms after me. “Ashley! My offer will not stand if you do not get this procedure done. You will be giving up your future,” she hisses. She is walking next to me while I pad down the hallway barefoot, push through the double doors and through the waiting room. People are turning to look at us pass.

“No,” I say. “Not the whole future. Just this version of it.”

“You are brilliant!” she grits out. “And beautiful! And I will not see you throw away your potential, Ashley.” Her voice is rising. She is almost—shouting. “I can't change—this is the only thing you can fix. I will not see you suffer and struggle and be overlooked. I can't protect you once you leave,” she says. “Do you hear me? I won't be able to protect you!”

I stop there in the hallway and see her. Her eyes are wild. Her plain face shows what she's been hiding so well. She's frightened. She is . . . panicked.

My indefatigable grandmother.

Is
scared
.

Of the world, and its judgments.

I could laugh and never stop. I could cry.

I say, “That's okay.” I pat her shoulder the way she has patted mine a thousand times. I say, “I can protect myself.”

I say it and I know I can. After all, I'm so much like my mother.

My feet are slapping against the linoleum floor, and the
automatic doors yawn open. I march out onto the sidewalk. It's gotten bright since we drove over here, the sun still that early-morning gold.

“You are out here in your hospital gown. Come inside. We'll talk about this rationally.” She takes my elbow but I shake her off.

“I have never liked saying no to you,” I say, struggling with the tie at my neck. “I've always been grateful to you.” It's knotted and I start to tug at it, pulling hard, shrugging out of the gown.

“Ashley, for god's sake.” She snatches the gown up from the ground, but I'm shrugging out of the other one.

I am light-headed from lack of food, from feeling so empty. I laugh. I drop the other gown on the sidewalk and she picks that up too. I back away from her.

“I'm not going to do this. I'm never going to do this. This is my body right here. This is what I have to work with. Are you listening to me?”

She stops. She can hear the tears in my voice. She can hear that I am telling the truth. She looks at me. I am standing there with my hands at my sides and I am naked and tired and dizzy.

She looks at the gowns in her hand, and back at me.

And she nods.

She nods, and I sag against the wall. Relief. Finally, relief.

She holds out the gowns to me. When I don't take them, she says, “Your clothes are upstairs. I will go fetch them.”

I gather the gowns into my arms and let my cheek roll
against the bricks behind me.

She touches my forehead. “You are burning up. Put those on, Ashley. Please.”

I shrug into both gowns, but can't figure out how to tie them. She gently moves my hands aside and ties neat, clean knots. She looks at me for a moment. “Wait here,” she says. “I'll be right back.”

When she's gone, I slide down the wall, sit on the concrete walkway. I put my head down on my scarred-up knees, and laughter is filling me up. Bubbling over and floating free.