Monday's Lie (3 page)

I froze.

Finally, a flinch from her; from somewhere deep in her eyes it shuddered and drew tears in its wake. “Two points for you, my darling, for stopping to think on that one.” But she did not tremble. Her hands were calm and she took my face between their warmth. She pressed her lips hard against my forehead. She hugged me to her, and the blue chenille smelled of Chanel No. 5. “You're such a bright girl, Plucky,” she whispered into my hair.

She pulled back. “
They
do indeed build the world. So do listen when they say things. Hear what they say and weigh it carefully. But when you hear
me
, remember that I
never
told you
not
to lie, baby girl.” She checked to see that it had sunk in. “I'll only warn you to hate it.”

G
rowing
up, we'd wanted for nothing. We lived in a plain, saltbox house on a plain, saltboxy cul-de-sac, but my mother always had her clothes, even her blue jeans, tailored. That's how I knew for certain we weren't like other people. My little brother was oblivious and never thought that it was odd that he had only to whine for a new football, baseball glove, or hockey stick and somehow “Uncle Paul” would, like a magician with his rabbit, pull it out of nowhere on his next visit. I'd get a bag of coconut Neapolitans and a bauble or a book. I could feel the oily purpose, like a film, on those gifts—
Keep 'em distracted and they won't ask any questions
. My mother would get a fat manila envelope or locked briefcase and a courtly kiss on the cheek.

I hated Uncle Paul. He'd take us out to dinner or to the movies, so I liked his visits well enough, and the coconut candies fed my rabid sweet tooth, but the air crackled whenever he came around. My stomach would go tight and heavy without ever answering to my brain for its unease. As I got older, I'd feel my hair bristle and my skin crimp into goose bumps, only to turn and find Uncle Paul watching me, a little knowing smile playing under his mustache.

“Annette, you're tuning them up. You sure that's wise?” I'd heard him say after one of our little standoffs. I turned the corner and held my breath to eavesdrop, but my mother only laughed.

•  •  •

Whether Paul Rowland approved of them or not, my mother's games put her eyes on me. Or perhaps more accurately to the way it really felt, the games were a sure chance to put me in her sights. I was the target, my mind a solid bull's-eye for her aim. I never felt more real, and she never felt more anchored to me, than when she worked a lesson of what could be known from the quick scanning of a deserted park trail or how much could be read in the postures of the people on a busy street corner.

My mother's attention had a clamping quality, and somehow I'd been born feeling full of helium, as if I'd sail away into oblivion if I weren't nailed down. She was all mine, the paperweight to my flutter, when I would work under her instruction, mastering whatever trick we were honing at the moment.

For me, that's what the games were for—for seeing her and for being truly seen. Simon, on the other hand, thought the games gave him superpowers.

From time to time, Simon took his fledgling knack for observation and deduction for a test-drive with varying degrees of success and the occasional punch in the nose.

He'd solved the case of our missing outdoor shoes when he was nine. First, my mother's left garden clog went missing. Then Simon's flip-flops and one of his soccer cleats disappeared. I straightaway brought in all my shoes from the back porch at the first sign of trouble and lost nothing. It turned out that our neighbors two streets over had a dog, and this dog had a neurotic affection for shoes with a sidecar mental disorder, a hoarding complex.

Simon staked out the clues and worked it all back to the dog's impressive stash of ancient-to-almost-brand-new footwear. Seven full pair in all, plus nineteen singleton shoes, left ones only, were squirreled away in the crook of an old planter and a hose box behind the neighbor's house. If only Simon could have figured out why the crazy hound always took the lefties first, I would have called the mission a complete victory. As it was, no one wanted the chewed-up, spider-infested things back, but Simon was pleased with himself, and to me at least, the world is always righter with one less mystery in it. My mother gave him twenty-five points for his persistence.

From that proud moment on, he was completely hooked on sleuthing.

Then when the middle-school band trip was in jeopardy from the theft of the fund-raiser candy, Simon put an eye on his classmates and an ear to the ground. His blood was up—in equal parts righteous indignation against crime in general and also that he'd been fizzing for months with barely hidden glee for the chance to play the saxophone in a big auditorium and take his own picture of the famous arch in St. Louis.

With a speed and precision that startled even our mother, Simon called out Brendan Corrigan and his buddies for nicking Red Cross badges from inside the blood-drive vans that had been out to the school, then selling the fund-raiser chocolate bars in the guise of volunteers, all on their own, for mad money. A couple of afternoons hitting up the far neighborhoods with red crosses pinned to their lapels, and suddenly Brendan Corrigan and his crew were pumping tokens into the arcade games all afternoon in flashy new sneakers.

But by the end of the week, both my brother and Brendan Corrigan were in the nurse's office with ice packs on their faces, and my mother was in the principal's conference room letting his canned speech slide right over her. I heard the whole thing from my chair, waiting just outside.

“Mrs. Vess, we're going to have to assign Simon a week's worth of after-school detention for fighting.” Mr. Campbell paused in the expectation of protest.

He got none. “I understand,” said my mother. “And I'm sure Simon does, too.”

“While we very much appreciate Simon's efforts to get the band fund-raiser back on track, I'm sure we can all agree that it would have been better if he'd simply brought the information to us and let us handle it. The tensions over tattling—”

“They didn't fight over the candy situation.”

“Pardon me?”

“You talked to them, yes?”

“I did,” said Campbell.

“Then you know it was all posturing. Chest beating.” She got no reply and presumably a blank look from Mr. Campbell. “A pissing contest? Once the Corrigan kid couldn't get a rise out of Simon by calling him names for getting him in trouble, he switched up tactics and called me a dyke.” I could see in my mind the curl of amusement bending her mouth and sending the words out sideways, letting them hit with just the right thump. Not too hard. Not too soft. The Goldilocks of confrontation.

Mr. Campbell coughed in discomfort, and even from the other side of the wall I could tell he didn't realize he'd done it. He would have been surprised to hear a taped playback of his automatic rumble of unease at considering my formidable mother in sexual terms of any sort.

I bit down on the corner of my lip to keep from smiling, wondering if she was, too. I was nearly seventeen, wavering on the line just past giddy blushing at anything in the same zip code as innuendo, past most of that sort of silliness, but not yet at peace with the idea that all kinds of things made the world go round, but nothing so much as sex and the near constant calculations over what to do about it.

Mr. Campbell cleared his throat. “Well, yes. I'm sorry you had to hear that. I'll have Mr. Corrigan write up an apology for baiting Simon like that and bringing you into it with an insult.”

“It's not an insult,” my mother said in her best peppermint voice.

More coughing from Campbell. “No! Of course not. I just meant—”

“It's fine. And it's all beside the point, too. It had nothing to do with me. ‘Your mama' jokes never do. It's all about escalation. It's what boys do.”

“Of course, of course. And I'm sure you don't need your son to defend you, Mrs. Vess.”

“Now why would you say that?” Voice a little warmer. Buttermints now. “You don't know me, Mr. Campbell, I could very well be emotionally delicate.”

Campbell's giggle-cough put him just where my mother liked him, liked all of them: talking freely. That's how she got things done.

The principal cleared his throat again, an obvious tic, not an allergy. “Now, the boys do have an option to replace detention with a joint presentation, of their own devising, to the Health and Development classes on why violence is never the answer to a conflict. They would work up a ten-to-fifteen-minute talk with slides or some kind of visual aids, and then they would lead a discussion. They'd get out of the detention and get extra credit for the project. We like to think of it as turning a negative into a positive.”

“Simon will take his detention.”

“Well, shouldn't we at least ask him if—”

“No.”

“Okay,” Mr. Campbell said, blunted to uncomfortable silence. She'd shut him down, withdrawn the light, rescinded the invitation to stand on the same step.

“Mr. Campbell, I know you mean well, but you'll strip every bit of lesson from this dustup if you or I or anyone else digs into their business any deeper. We don't need to turn this into anything in particular for them, positive or negative. Let the boys weigh the pain in their faces that they feel today and the nice afternoons that they're going to lose to detention next week against whether or not it was worth it to push it that far or, on the other hand, to push back to make it stop.”

“Mrs. Vess, you can't want Simon to think anything's ever settled by force.”

“Of course not,” she said, all velvet bludgeon. “Except for the things that are. Life is choices, Mr. Campbell. And sometimes other people's choices even more than your own.”

Friday

I
'm
headed straight west and the sun is preheating this damned oven of a car. I'll be cooked by the time I get there. But even though it's way too hot in here, I roll down the windows instead of turning on the air. I'm already not blinking enough as it is, staring wide to take in all of this road that I've never seen before, making sure I don't miss anything. That's how I do it when I'm caught out of my routine. I can take the shine off anything new faster than anyone I know. I scour down every novelty with lathered-up concentration until it feels normal.

So I'm studying this countryside hard, eyes scanning, cataloging the roll of the road and the different shades of green at the borders. The few sections of as-yet-undeveloped fields are flagged with ruins, the silvered barns in the near distance looking set there as leaning markers to the time when this was probably all one vast farm. I don't want cold air pouring into my face from the vents and drying out my eyes any more than they already are. If it did, then I'd blink. Then I'd miss something. Then I'd doubt. And when I doubt, I freeze. And when I freeze, I convince myself that maybe it's not so bad—it's familiar, it's safe, it's normal, I guess I'll just stay here. . . .

So instead, I'll use the windows and be too hot.

My mother would laugh at me, overthinking my eyeballs along with everything else. But she's not here. No matter how hard I wish she were. So I laugh at me for her, out loud. The sound is startling and out of place and I like it. I definitely don't recognize myself today.

My alpha error, it seems, was seeded in me sometime shortly after Santa Claus was exposed for a fraud. I've somehow thought that I needed to figure out my mother in order to figure out myself. For the longest time, I've been adamant that her contradictions are not mine, that gentleness and warmth don't come in the same package as danger and cunning. If they appear to, then one of the elements has to be a lie, or at the very least, it has to be less true than all the others. Except I won't admit that I know well—too well, even—that sometimes it works out to be just exactly that way.

That mistake has taken me so far around the long way in life, in a detour on the way to myself, that skimming over these unfamiliar roads right now is also something that feels exactly right. It's time. I have no idea where I'm going. But I know what I'll find when I get there. I'll find me.

•  •  •

Contradictions, and even polar opposites, coexist in the same skin. Of course they do. I have to know that and admit it now, because a nice set of contradictions lived—and still does—in me, if not comfortably then at least functionally. Right from the beginning, I was always both fascinated and mortified by the stories of my mother's escapades, simultaneously pulled and repelled by imagining her doing these crazy things that were nothing like what she did every day at home where I could see her.

One of her more elegant gifts was for narrative without handholds. Her stories rang like swordplay and sparked with every humor that glinted off the sharper edges of the tale. But when she was done and the laughter had faded and the dishes were drying in the rack, only then would you realize that you'd never be able to point to a spot on a map or a box on the calendar to make any more of it than what she'd given you. You could think on it all day, or all of your days even, and never work so much as one extra deduction from putting her various twos and twos together, or come to any conclusion that she hadn't spoon-fed you.

And for all the years afterward, you could only ever retell the story the way she did, or less so. Those were your choices. She'd left no clue as to where it fit into her heart or her résumé. It was just a fable, not a link to the how or why she'd been in place to see such a marvel, never a hint as to what she had been doing.

I was impressed with her, but afraid I didn't know her. My mother was kind; she was devoted. And she was also an asskicker.

In the overlap of our lifetimes, I'd heard her tell one story a hundred times, and it never delivered any clarity on how much she might have mourned her first professional injury and the resulting scar it left, but the story of how it happened never got old. I had already eavesdropped it into my memory by the time I could tie my shoes, as it spooled out again and again to uniformed or plainclothes company, but I loved it even more, with wide-eyed dismay, when it was told just for me, for the first time when I was eleven years old. Being trusted with it, counted old enough to be part of the conversation, her dark eyes steady on mine, it was better than the cherry on top of my prize ice-cream sundae.