Very in Pieces (10 page)

Ramona trip-trops down the stairs and into the room. One side of her hair is pulled back with a pink feathered clip, and
her fingertips are stained with ink. “Nonnie!” she says with surprise.

“We're having a family dinner.”

“Really?” she asks. She sits down on the arm of a chair. “What's the special occasion?”

“No occasion,” I say. “Just because we're a family.”

“Veronica is being dictatorial again,” Mom says. “Like the time with the picture place at the mall.”

That had been a fiasco. It was in third grade and it seemed like every other kid in the world was going to this new store in the mall for family portraits. It was right in the food court, so everyone eating their lazy food could watch as you grinned at the camera. We wore jeans and white button-down shirts. The photographer, some sort of art-school dropout, directed us with a bored look. Ramona and I sat on the ground, back-to-back, knees to chest. Mom and Dad stood above us, holding hands, each with their other hand on one of our shoulders. The photographer snapped. I grinned like an idiot. The other three looked dead serious. Mom loved it and hung it above the mantel in the library.

“I'm being familial.”

Mom holds the book in front of her. “Dorothy was such a wit,” she says as she turns the page. “She didn't have any daughters.”

“I have heard that daughters drain a woman's wit,” I reply.

My mother lowers her book then and arches her eyebrows at me with a wry smile. “You win,” she says. “To the victors go the spoils, and all that. We can have a family dinner. Only we don't
have anything to cook and your father's at some symposium on campus.”

“No one expected him to be here,” Ramona says. Mom gives her a sharp look but says nothing.

“I need to sit down,” Nonnie tells me.

I help her over to the couch, ease her down, and drape our red afghan over her lap. Once she's settled, I bring her the brandy I poured.

“Dinner will be served in half an hour. Come on, Ramona.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you're all I've got.”

v.

Ramona and I can't find an actual meal, but we manage to pull together enough small dishes to satisfy us: crab Rangoon and spanakopita from the freezer (age indeterminate); pickled herring, almonds, and figs from the pantry; and some mushrooms that we sauté in balsamic vinegar with garlic. We find crackers that are only on the cusp of staleness, and even mango sorbet that isn't freezer-burned that we plan to serve in tiny cups as a palate cleanser.

“It's ooh-la-la fancy, don't you think?” Ramona asks. “We should pretend we are the help and we can stay in here and have catty conversations while they eat.”

“What would we have catty conversations about?”

“Oh, all the intrigue of the upstairs folks. Like I hear that young Ramona child is canoodling with the chauffeur.”

“Indeed!” I say. I keep arranging the spanakopita on the tray. It's like if I look at her, this old version of Ramona might disappear back into the new model. “George is a nice fellow but if he isn't careful, he'll lose his position.”

“They say he's mad for her.”

“Mad for her money, I'd say.”

“The problem is, she won't get a penny.” Ramona takes the crab Rangoon from the toaster oven and drops them onto a plate. “Her dastardly brother is coming back from overseas and he's sure to run this family into the ground. We'll be lucky if any of us have a job.”

“It's the ponies,” I say. “He's betting the whole fortune away.”

“Who's betting on the ponies?” Nonnie asks as she comes in, Mom holding her arm.

“Alistair,” Ramona replies. “He's up to his old tricks.”

“That rascal!” Mom says. She's always been able to jump right into these games.

“To the dining room!” I tell Mom and Nonnie. “Tonight's meal will be small plates, otherwise known as tapas. It's all the rage.”

As Ramona and I finish preparing the food, I say, “You should lay off about Dad. He has a lot going on.”

She smirks. “Does he now?”

“Come on, this is turning into a nice night.”

Her shoulders ease down and she turns her head a bit to the side. “You know, we could do this every night. Eat as a family.”

“You mean like we used to?” I ask. I can't even remember exactly when it was that Dad stopped picking up food at the market for us to have each night. We used to go around the table and share the most amazing thing that had happened that day, only it didn't have to be true. My stories almost always were, though I did once try to claim that Stephen Hawking had visited our school. Ramona would go on and on with her stories of escapees from the buffalo farm on the edge of town, or how it had snowed from one single cloud, a blizzard that covered the playground slide with a layer of white. Nonnie was the best storyteller, though. You could never tell if her stories were true or imagined, or some amalgamation of the two.

“Only we'd make dinner,” Ramona says. “Really make it, like, not ready-made stuff. We'd cook it. You and me. We should take a class. Like when we did that bracelet-making class at the library. We could take a cooking class. At that cooking school. In Dover, I think. Or Portsmouth.”

“That's for people who want to be chefs. Like instead of going to college, they go there.”

“I could want to be a chef.”

“You could want to do all sorts of things. But I'm saying that we can't just show up and ask for a Cooking 101 course.”

“We could cook dinner every night, though.”

“Sure we could. We could also fly to the moon.” I use my hip to push the door into the dining room open. “Come on, Ramona, we have to get this onto the table.”

While I help Nonnie to fill her plate, Ramona serves our
mother chilled white wine.

“This is my favorite kind of meal,” Mom says. “A bit of everything.” She breaks a spanakopita in half and manages to eat it without dropping one flake of phyllo dough on herself.

“That's what happens when a girl is raised on cocktail parties,” Nonnie says. “It was the cheapest way to feed her—just bring her along with me.”

“And if they said no children, I'd do a little dog and pony show for them,” Mom says.

“What do you mean?” Ramona asks.

“She'd recite T. S. Eliot and then insult their wine selection.”

“Come one, come all, see the poetess's daughter perform!”

“It wasn't like that,” Nonnie says. “Your wine talks were a public service.”

“That's true,” Mom says. “Half the time those folks didn't know the first thing about good wine.”

“How did you know?” Ramona asks.

“I read a lot of magazines,” Mom replies. “Remember that awful Mrs. Finnegan, who said you were teaching me to be a drunken harlot?”

Nonnie tilts her head back. “Lorraine Elizabeth Finnegan, patroness of the arts. So long as said arts were clean, predictable, and not at all appealing to her husband.”

Ramona giggles beside me and helps herself to a crab Rangoon. “Hey, Mom, after dinner can I go up to your studio to look at some of your art books? We're doing self-portraits and I want to get some ideas.”

“I'll get one for you,” Mom replies.

“I don't know which one I want.”

“Sorry. Studio's closed. Take it up with management.” She forces a smile before taking a sip from her wine.

Ramona turns a spanakopita at a right angle. “I don't know why you like working alone. I like being in the art room at school, seeing all the other pieces, the buzz, you know?”

Mom doesn't answer.

“Let's talk about something Very can relate to,” Nonnie suggests.

“I can relate. It's like my math class at the college. You're sitting around discussing solutions. You see how someone else came at it. Maybe you won't use it on that problem, but you tuck it away for another.”

“Artworks aren't exactly problems to be solved, dear,” Mom says.

“Don't you think so?” Ramona asks. “You have your goal, the outcome you see in your head, and you have to figure out the best medium and techniques to use.”

“That's for assigned art: art you have to do. Real art comes from someplace else, someplace within you, and you follow it.”

“What about commissions?” Ramona asks.

“What about them?” Mom's starting to get an edge in her voice.

“Now we
are
talking about something outside of my realm,” I say, desperate to pull us back.

Nonnie glances at me over her wine and nods.

Mom picks up a fig between her thumb and forefinger and drops it into her mouth.

“You know how figs are pollinated?” I ask.

“How?” Mom asks.

“Fig wasps. The female wasp goes into the well, the sort of the bud of the fig, and she lays her eggs. She's the one that pollinates the fig flowers, too, when she lays her eggs. But getting in, she loses her wings. It doesn't matter, though, because as soon as she lays her eggs, she dies. The very act of giving birth kills her.”

“This is not the happy story I was expecting,” Mom says. She has her foot drawn up onto her chair, her wineglass held lightly between her fingers.

“It gets worse. So then the nonpollinating females come in and are basically hitching a ride on her work. They lay their eggs, too. When they hatch, the male wasps immediately search for a mate. Then they dig their way out of the fig, and all the female wasps can escape and go lay their eggs in other figs.”

“That's better. I've always liked a hero, even a wasp.”

“But,” I say, “once the male gets out, he dies, too.”

Mom holds the fig up and regards it. “Love, birth, tragedy, death. It's like this fig contains the works of Shakespeare.” Then she bites it in half. She lifts her wineglass. “To the male wasp, who saves us all.”

“How about a toast to the wasp who gives her life to lay her eggs?” I ask.

“Of course, her, too,” Mom says.

“And to the wasps who get away,” Nonnie adds.

And we all clink our glasses together.

Cheers!

i.

WHEN I GET TO
school, I find that someone has graffitied my locker. I say
someone
, but who else but Dominic could have written the lyrics to “Veronica” in red Sharpie on the fire-hydrant-yellow door? The words swirl together like they are ants trailing their queen in a May Day dance.

I'm just standing there staring at it when Haylie, one of Ramona's friends, comes up beside me. She's wearing canvas sneakers with sparkling cherries on them. “Is that where your name comes from?” she asks.

I nod.

“Weird,” she says. “That someone would write it on your locker. I mean, like, yeah?”

Haylie always seems to be starting sentences and then finishing them with a string of words that don't quite make sense.

“You haven't been around much lately,” I tell her. “You
should come by the house. I could drive you and Ramona home if you want.”

She kicks her toe into the linoleum tile and the sparkles on her shoes cast glimmering, dancing red light onto the floor. “So, yeah? I mean, maybe, if you want?”

“Of course. You and Ramona work it out.”

“Right. Okay?”

The bell rings.

“Great. See you later, Haylie.”

“See ya?”

Down the hall in his classroom, Mr. Tompkins seems to be waiting for me. “I have exciting news for you!” He doesn't give me enough time to prompt him with a
What?
before he bursts out with “Professor Singh is coming to the Math Around U conference!”

Last year Mr. Tompkins submitted one of my math solutions and explanations as part of a proposal for a session at a conference. It has a hokey name: Math Around U, and it focuses on teaching math to kids about to enter college, in college, and in graduate school. Anyway, they chose his proposal, and in a few weeks, he's going to present his methods, and I get to go along.

“Professor Singh was my favorite prof at MIT. She's brilliant. Brilliant! And I think the kind of math she does will fascinate you. So . . .” He drums his fingers on his desk. “I've arranged for the two of you to have coffee. Her schedule is jam-packed, but I explained how very smart you are—”

“Please tell me you didn't use the L'Hopital's rule pun again.”

He shrugs and then says, “This is a big deal, Very. She is a big deal. And listen, I'm not trying to pressure you to go to MIT, even though that's where I went and even though it's quite simply the best institution in the world for mathematicians, especially one of your caliber, but if you did decide to apply, and Professor Singh put in a good word for you, well, that would be about as close to a shoo-in as you get there.”

“Thank you,” I say. I can picture myself sitting there with Professor Singh, two women mathematicians, in that old vein of student and teacher, like Plato and Aristotle, only with better hair. In my imagination, Professor Singh has waves of dark hair with copper highlights, and we are laughing about a clever proof I've done. Laughing, and my soul is at peace because now I'm settled. It's not so much MIT—or Stanford or even Minnesota—it's knowing. In this imaginary future world I am happy because at least one huge, looming decision is taken care of.

He hands me a manila envelope. “Here are some of her articles. I was going to give them to you earlier, but I wanted to make sure she was able to come and could meet with you.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course, we'll have to get a better handle on this silly chemistry stuff for you.”

I take my seat center front, as if being right there will somehow make the information get into my head more easily. Christian comes in a moment later and slides into the seat next to me. He moves like he's going to kiss me on the cheek, and I duck away. Kisses don't belong in classrooms.

Mr. Tompkins starts to explain the symbols he's drawn on the board. There are plus signs. I'm comfortable with plus signs. It's that arrow instead of an equals sign that gives me trouble. What goes on in that arrow, the invisible transformation of molecules from one thing into something entirely different, always seems just out of reach to me.

Still, I copy down everything from the board just as he has written it. I even use his oddly shaped
J
for joules. When I look up from my paper, Mr. Tompkins is standing by the door. Just beyond him, on the other side of the glass, Dominic stands in the hallway. He's staring right at me, and when he notices I'm looking at him, he starts to gesture at me to come out and meet him. I frown and glance at Christian, who, as if the glance has weight, looks up, first at me, then to Dominic in the hallway, then back at me. In the hallway, Dominic smirks. But then he beckons again, softer this time. I trace over the letters of the equation.

“So, let's start working through this thing.” Mr. Tompkins claps his hands together. “Come on, guys, show me what you've got.”

Adam, he of the hard but evidently scientifically inclined head, raises his hand.

“Adam, awesome. You're going to take a break from tackling girls in the hallway to help us solve the mysteries of chemistry.”

I run my hand over my bruise, which is more green now than blue.

“Actually I need to go to the bathroom,” Adam says, blushing.

“Rookie move there, Adam.”

“As soon as I get back, Mr. Tompkins, I'll be all over the problem.”

On the way out, he taps my desk and mouths the word “Sorry,” which is, by my estimation, his seventeenth apology.

I look down at my paper. I know I can figure this out. It's not that hard. My attention is drawn back to the hallway, but when I look out the window, Dominic is gone.

“Any actual volunteer who wants to explain his or her process?”

Stupid Dominic. I didn't even get a chance to think about the problem with him out there waving his arms around. Mr. Tompkins calls on Christian, who explains that when the sodium hydroxide is mixed with the hydrogen chloride, it neutralizes the hydrogen chloride.

Neutralizes
. It's like that sodium hydroxide comes in and just takes over all the spicy acidity of the hydrogen chloride. I'm not one for personifying inanimate objects—Nonnie would call that sentimentality—but I almost feel bad for that hydrogen chloride, giving up all its personality in the arrow.

“So,” Christian goes on, “we take our specific heat capacity equation and plug in the known values.”

Our specific heat capacity
. What is our specific heat capacity, Christian? Have we reached it? I smile for a moment, catch myself, then frown at my paper. I can't help but feel like Christian is explaining this in a slow and deliberate manner for my benefit. I'm not used to feeling this way, left behind in a science class. I can't say that I like it.

ii.

Ms. Pickering is waiting for me at my locker. Frowning. This is not normally the way I am greeted by the assistant principal and it makes me feel about as uncomfortable as my floundering in chemistry class. “I had hoped this was a mix-up,” she says, pointing to my locker.

“I didn't write it there,” I tell her.

“Of course you didn't. I just wondered if perhaps you might have some idea who did.”

“No,” I lie, annoyed with Ms. Pickering for finding it completely impossible to believe that I might have written on the locker myself.

She nods her head. “Well, if you could clean it up, that would be grand.”

“I think it was done with a Sharpie. It might need new paint.”

She sighs. Sighing is something else I've never gotten from an assistant principal. “Just do the best you can, okay?”

This seems like especially poor leadership on her part. She just told me that she knew I hadn't done it.
Of course
not. What other court requires the victim to clean up the crime scene? Next thing you know the police or whoever are going to be making Nonnie clean the bottle caps off our house with a toothbrush. Maybe if Ms. Pickering were doing a better job looking after the school, Dominic wouldn't have had a chance to write on my locker in the first place.

She starts to go, but then says, “How's the class up at the college going?”

“Great.” Now we are back on familiar territory.

“We're awfully proud of you, Veronica.”

“Thanks.”

As she walks away, Christian arrives from his locker on the other end of the hall. When he gets close, he gives me the peck on the cheek that I avoided during chemistry. “What's up with your locker?”

“I don't know, but it's the topic du jour.”

He grins. “I love when you speak French to me.”

I giggle. Isn't that what girls are supposed to do in these situations? Giggle? Sometimes it's exhausting just trying to get it right. He looks away from me, and at my locker, reading the lyrics. “Depressing song.”

“I don't know. It grows on you.”

He wraps his arm around my shoulder and says, “We got Portugal for Model UN. Can you believe it? Portugal!”

“I can't think of anything wrong with Portugal.”

“Can you think of anything right?”

“Um, I can't say that I know that much about Portugal. Modern Portugal anyway.”

“Exactly. It's a nonentity. We will have no pull. We might as well be nonvoting members.” He shakes his head. “I was hoping for Pakistan this year.”

“Portugal used to be a huge power. They had all those colonies.”

“Hundreds of years ago.”

“It could change back. You never know.”

“Somehow I doubt that they're going to get back on top in the next three months, but I admire your optimism.” He starts going on about the economic situation and debt ratios and the utter hopelessness of Portugal being anything but a second- or third-rate country.

I try to listen to him, but instead I'm thinking about Ms. Pickering's assumption. Okay, sure, it would be tremendously stupid to scrawl graffiti on my own locker—especially song lyrics about my own name—and everyone knows that I'm not stupid. But someone like Dominic or Ramona, they aren't stupid, and if there was graffiti on their lockers, no one would doubt that they could have done it themselves.

“Why do you think Ms. Pickering was so sure I didn't write on my locker?”

“What?” Christian asks, breaking off his monologue. “Well, because that's just not something you'd do.”

“I might. If I had a good reason.” I think of the bottle caps glued to our house: there has to be some reason for them. Someone is trying to say something about Nonnie—or to her. Whatever it is, the message is unclear. I glance at my locker. Two acts of graffiti in two days. Maybe the bottle caps aren't about Nonnie.

“What would be a good reason for writing on a locker?”

“Well, maybe not writing on a locker per se, but some act of graffiti maybe.”

Christian shakes his head. “What type of vandalism is acceptable?”

“I don't know. Something artistic. Or political.”

He wrinkles his nose. “There are more effective means of political expression.”

We've gone way off course from my original question. All I want to know is what would happen if I just ignored people's expectations. What if, for just one day, I didn't want that to be me? What if I decided to be like Ramona and only focus on math the way she focuses on art? Or like Dru, and come to school with a new look and a new name and just expect everyone to play along? What if I did want to glue bottle caps to my house? My mind is reeling. I'm like a little kid on the playground who's just been pushed off the swing by a bigger kid, one old enough to know better, stunned and sore at the unfairness of it all.

Christian is back to griping about Portugal, and I'm nodding, but I guess not in the right places, because finally he says, “Is everything okay?”

“Sure, of course,” I say hastily.

“I thought maybe your grandmother had taken a turn for the worse or something. You're just not quite all here.”

I shake my head. “It's nothing.”

“In chemistry, too. You kept looking out in the hall like you were expecting someone to come in. So I thought maybe you were anticipating bad news. But the only person I saw out there was Dominic Meyers.”

“Who?” I ask, the word escaping from my lips like a bubble from a wand.

“Dominic Meyers. It kind of looked like he was waving at you. Again.”

“I didn't notice. I was trying to figure out that specific heat capacity problem. How the sodium hydroxide neutralizes the hydrogen chloride.”

“Actually, they neutralize each other. I'll help you with it later.”

“Thanks.” I lace my fingers through his. “And I'm fine.”

“Good.” He nods as if we've settled something. “I like your outfit.”

This is one of the things that perplexes me about Christian. I'm wearing capri-length jeans and a pink T-shirt. It's pretty similar to what I wear most days, not worth commenting about. “Oh, thanks.” And then, because it seems only right to balance things, I add, “I like your shirt,” though he, too, is wearing just a simple T-shirt. “The color, it looks nice with your eyes.” There. At least I added a detail to make it more personal, more plausible. And he does have beautiful eyes.

He seems to blush. “Thanks, Very. That's sweet.”

I'm walking on a tightrope. Every day. A little too far one way or the other and I'll come crashing down to the pavement.

iii.

That night, with time I've set aside for looking up college information online, I instead research graffiti. Sitting in the living room with my laptop resting on my knees, I read about Banksy, who painted murals of peace around the West Bank, gorgeous silhouettes against crumbling walls. And Keith Haring, whose brightly colored figures ended up being used to increase awareness about AIDS. It's not all just people scribbling to leave a mark.