The Smart One (9 page)

Elizabeth was different from other mothers—Cleo knew that from the time she was about four. Some of the other mothers who worked hugged their children tightly when they dropped them off at school, declared how much they’d miss them, and surprised them by showing up early and taking them out of school for the day.

When Elizabeth dropped Cleo off, she’d walk her to the door, give her a light pat (usually on the head or back, sometimes on the arm), and walk away quickly. The few times that Cleo whined or clung to her, Elizabeth had been annoyed. “I have to go,” she would say. “That’s how it works. You stay here, and I have to go.”

It wasn’t that Elizabeth was a bad mom—she was just different. Cleo never felt bad for herself or imagined that she was missing out on anything. Mostly, she just wondered how they were even related.

“If I’m adopted,” Cleo said once when she was twelve, “just tell me now. I can handle it.”

Her mom had looked up from the computer, serious, and for a moment Cleo thought this would be the big reveal, when her mom admitted everything. Then Elizabeth had thrown her head back and laughed. Cleo had been insulted. “It’s not funny,” she said over and over, until Elizabeth was able to talk.

“I promise you, you’re mine. You’re not adopted. I grew you, I gave birth to you. Sorry, kid. This is it.”

Elizabeth wasn’t a liar, and she certainly wasn’t one to lie to protect
feelings, and so Cleo didn’t argue. (Though she was deeply disturbed by the idea that she’d been “grown” by Elizabeth, like a plant or a sea monkey.) As she got older, Cleo could see that she looked just like Elizabeth, almost identical, really, and so she tried to ignore the thought that her real mother was living somewhere else.

How else could she explain the differences? Elizabeth was entirely unsentimental. She barely kept photographs, let alone souvenirs or letters or any sort of memorabilia. Cleo kept it all. She kept every birthday card she’d ever gotten, even the ones from people she didn’t like. When she tried to throw them out, she found that she couldn’t—they looked so sad in the trash, the balloons and smiling animals staring up at her, and so she ended up pulling them back out and putting them safely in a box.

Cleo saved tests and old notebooks, papers that she was especially proud of, notes from her classmates. She saved the cap from the first beer she ever drank (a Miller Lite). She hated to give away clothes, even if she never wore them or they didn’t fit anymore. It seemed so mean to just discard them, like they had feelings and would be hurt when boxed and sent to Goodwill.

It was problematic to be a “low-level hoarder” (as Elizabeth called her) while living in New York. Their apartment at Seventy-ninth and Riverside was nice—spacious even, by most standards—but it was still an apartment in New York. Sometimes Elizabeth would reach her breaking point, and lay down the law, sounding more like a mother than she usually did. “You need to get rid of this stuff,” she’d say, looking in Cleo’s closet. “What is all this junk?” She’d hold up a stuffed elephant by its ear, and toss it on the floor, like it was going to be the first thing they threw out.

“No,” Cleo would say. She’d rescue the elephant. “I’ll clean it out, just don’t touch anything, please don’t touch a thing.”

It was the same thing she’d made her mom promise when she went off to college. “My room is off limits,” she said. “You aren’t allowed to throw out one thing—not one thing—while I’m gone.” She made Elizabeth swear up and down a million times before she was satisfied. And still she sometimes worried that Elizabeth would get the urge to
clean and would throw out all of her memories—her stuffed animals and dolls, her favorite books, her journals—would bag them up in big black garbage bags, until there was nothing left of her.

ELIZABETH WAS IMPATIENT WHEN CLEO
moved into the dorm. Most of the other mothers were making the beds, dusting, or folding clothes. Elizabeth sat on the desk chair and watched Cleo do all of these things, looking at her BlackBerry or her watch every few minutes. Elizabeth hadn’t offered to help, but even if she had, Cleo would have declined. Cleo wanted to put everything together herself. She knew that if her mom helped, she’d rush through it, and she didn’t want her underwear thrown in a messy pile in a drawer. She and Elizabeth didn’t have the kind of relationship where she trusted Elizabeth to fold her underwear.

Every so often, parents or other kids moving into their rooms on the hall popped their heads in to say hi. Elizabeth, who was wearing jeans that looked crisp and pressed, flats, and a button-down, barely smiled at these people. “Hello,” she’d say quickly, nodding her head at their response as if agreeing with them,
Yes, it is a pleasure to meet me, isn’t it?

Cleo was used to the way her mom didn’t quite fit into social situations. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do or say to come across as normal and friendly—she just didn’t care. “Be your own person,” she always said to Cleo. As if there were a choice to be someone else.

Once in sixth grade, when Cleo was crying because Susan Cantor cut her out of the lunch table, told her she couldn’t sit there anymore, Elizabeth had said, “Why do you care about those girls? If they don’t want to be your friend, why do you want to be theirs?”

Whenever Cleo went out of her way to be nice to people, writing letters to her grandmother, being polite to her friends’ parents or to her teachers, Elizabeth would sometimes comment later, “Good God, Cleo, you can’t get everyone in the world to like you. Why try?” Elizabeth was used to being disliked—Cleo suspected she even enjoyed it—and she couldn’t imagine why her daughter wasn’t the same. “You’re such a people pleaser,” she’d said on more than one occasion, in the same way people said, “You’re such a liar,” or “You’re such a cokehead.”

Cleo’s roommate, a small Asian girl named Grace, had already moved her things in and gone off to try to meet up with the dance troupe she wanted to join. “I’m passionate about dancing,” she’d said when they met. Cleo had nodded and tried to think of a fact she could share. “I was on the school paper,” she’d finally said. Grace had nodded like this was satisfactory.

“I’m almost done, Mom,” Cleo told Elizabeth. She was done with her bed and was on to unpacking her clothes into the drawers. Just then she turned and saw a man at the door to the room, “Knock, knock,” he said. Cleo screamed, and he smiled apologetically.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you! I just came to offer my services.” He held up a hammer and a box of tools. “My wife and daughter suggested I see if anyone on the hall needed help hanging things up. I suspect they just wanted me out of the room.” He winked at Elizabeth, and she gave him a small smile. Cleo laughed loudly to make up for her mom.

“That would be amazing,” she said. “I wanted to put this shelf up, but I’m actually not sure how to do it.”

“That should be no sweat. I’m Jack Collaruso, by the way. My daughter, Monica, is moving in down the hall.” He stopped to shake Elizabeth’s hand and then Cleo’s, and then he turned to the wall and began making marks with a pencil. “Monica’s our oldest, so my wife’s not handling this so well.”

Elizabeth made a sound then, a sort of agreement grunt that made it clear she wasn’t very interested in Monica or her mother’s emotional turmoil. For twenty minutes, the conversation continued like this. Jack would say something, trying to include Elizabeth in the Club of Parents Dropping Their Children Off at College, and Elizabeth would give a borderline rude reaction, while Cleo went out of her way trying to be charming and polite to make up for it. By the time the shelf was hung, Cleo was sweating.

As Jack was finishing putting up the shelf, a dark-haired mother and daughter poked their heads in. “There you are,” the woman said. “We thought we’d lost you.”

“You told me to go be helpful,” Jack said. The two smiled at each
other and Cleo got the feeling of watching a play or a sitcom about a couple taking their daughter to college.

“This is my wife, Mary Ann, and my daughter, Monica,” Jack said. He put his arm around Monica’s shoulders and smiled. Monica looked at the floor, and Cleo wanted to tell her that she had no reason to be embarrassed for her parents when Elizabeth, who was clearly the most embarrassing parent, was sitting right there.

“I was going to run down and get a cup of coffee somewhere. All this unpacking and crying has made me tired,” Mary Ann said.

“Mom.” Monica rolled her eyes, but smiled.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Mary Ann was smiling and looking at Elizabeth, who looked at Cleo and then stood up.

“Coffee sounds good,” Elizabeth said. Cleo let out a breath and Elizabeth gave her a look that said,
You need to relax
.

“That’s great. It will give these two a chance to get to know each other.” Mary Ann squeezed Monica’s arm and smiled.

After their parents left, Cleo and Monica looked at each other for a few seconds. Cleo wondered if they were just going to stay like that forever, just silently staring until their parents got back, and then Monica said, “So, where are you from?”

“New York. What about you?”

“Boston. Well, just outside. Lynnfield.”

Cleo nodded. “I’ve heard of it,” she said, although she hadn’t.

“Hey,” Monica said. She was staring at Cleo’s bed, where the gray ears of a formerly pink bunny were sticking out from behind a pillow. It was Cleo’s baby blanket—a bunny head attached to a blanket, which used to be pink but was now faded. Monica walked over to the bed, and Cleo tried to think of something to say. Should she deny it was hers? Say that Elizabeth brought it? Or would that make it worse? Cleo had had the blanket for as long as she could remember. It was a thing that you gave babies—they were called snugglies or something like that. Cleo always called hers Bunny Nubby, and when she was younger, she had liked to hold it in her right hand and press it against her face while she sucked her thumb. She’d thought about leaving Bunny Nubby behind, but when she imagined sleeping in a strange room, she knew
she wanted him there. When Elizabeth had seen her pull it out earlier that day, she’d made a face and said, “Oh Cleo, really?” And so Cleo had hidden it behind the pillow so no one else could see it and so Elizabeth wouldn’t make any more comments.

And now Monica was walking right over to it, leaning over and plucking Bunny Nubby out from behind the pillow, dropping it on the bed and then running out of the room. Cleo stood there. She felt dizzy. What was Monica going to do? Announce to the hall that she had a baby blanket with her? Wasn’t this sort of behavior supposed to be done with? Wasn’t this the kind of thing that girls in junior high did to each other? Bunny Nubby was lying crumpled on the bed, and Cleo was just about to go and rescue him, put him in her drawer or somewhere safe, when Monica came running back in the room, breathing hard and holding her own matching bunny blanket.

“Look,” she said. She sounded delighted and held her blanket next to Bunny Nubby. “Twins!”

FROM THAT POINT ON,
Cleo and Monica were always together. Most people they met assumed the two had known each other before they’d gotten to Bucknell, that they’d gone to high school together or had been friends for a long time. Their names were almost always said together, Monica and Cleo, like they were some sort of celebrity couple. Cleo loved this. She’d had friends before, but never a best friend. She was always the girl that was the addition to the group, the peripheral friend that was nice to have there but wasn’t missed if she wasn’t; and while she was fond of her high school friends, she didn’t miss them all that much.

Monica’s roommate, a girl named Sumi Minderschmidt, had never shown up. A week into the semester, Monica found out that Sumi had decided to go to Villanova instead. “Poor Sumes,” Monica said. “Confused until the very end.”

They loved Sumi’s name, and would often say things to each other like, “You know who loves Lucky Charms? Sumi Minderschmidt,” or “Who do you think you are? A Minderschmidt?”

Cleo was in heaven. She and Monica had inside jokes that could
make them double over with laughter, make everyone else look at them with jealousy. They were a pair, a team. And so, a few days after they found out that Sumi wouldn’t be joining them, Monica blurted out, “You should just move in here.” She said it quickly, like she was professing her love for Cleo and was afraid she was going to be rebuffed.

“Okay!” Cleo said. She was delighted. She’d been thinking the same thing, but hadn’t wanted to be the one to bring it up. It was Monica’s room, and she thought maybe she would want it all to herself, but Cleo was so sick of Grace and her spandex dance outfits, and the way she slept with an eye mask and a noise machine set to “Babbling Brook” that made Cleo have to pee. If Cleo ever left the room while Grace was sleeping, she’d hear about it the next day. “You woke me up,” Grace would say. “We can’t have that happen. I just really need my rest for dancing.”

And so the girls got permission from the RA, a senior named Colleen, who was never there much anyway, and moved all of Cleo’s things into Monica’s room. They were perfect together as roommates. They ate pretzels dipped in peanut butter and talked seriously about which famous person they would choose to be their boyfriend. “It can’t just be about looks,” Monica would always say. “It has to be about their personality, too.”

Monica’s Boston accent was surprising and harsh, and at first Cleo found herself reaching out her hand and placing it on Monica’s arm, as if that could somehow soften the edge of her words. But soon she got used to it, the way that she could hear Monica talking loudly down the hall, the way her voice was sort of like a chicken squawk. Cleo found that she started to like the way it sounded, and she sometimes used the word
wicked
herself, when the situation called for it.

They made up dance routines in their room, after drinking vodka mixed with orange guava juice that they carried back from the dining hall in huge cups. They accompanied each other to parties of upper-classmen, where they were always welcome. Cleo found that their prettiness was somehow multiplied when they were together, that people seemed to notice them more and gave them more attention. She thought maybe it was because when they stood next to each other,
Monica’s hair looked darker and hers looked blonder and the difference was striking. But that was just a theory.