Vintage Veronica (24 page)

Home. Ugh.

There’s no place to go but home.

No place to go but home. Isn’t that what Dorothy says at the end of
The Wizard of Oz
? No, wait, that’s “There’s no place like home.” Not exactly the same thing.

Dragging my feet, I can’t help thinking about how good it would be if I could go to Dorothy’s home instead of mine.
It sounds like the kind of place you’d want to go if you were feeling tired, demoralized, embarrassed, rejected, and just plain sad. A place of comfort, an oasis, where everyone’s glad to see you and welcome you just the way that you are.
Oh, Auntie Em—there’s no place like home!

My house is nothing like that. Seriously, my house can be found in the dictionary under “unhomey.” We used to have a living room, but the place where the living room used to be is now my mom’s dance studio. It looks like someone came through with a giant vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the furniture. No joke: there’s a barre where the television used to be. The kitchen has that sucked-up look, too. The countertop is like a desert landscape interrupted only by two objects on the horizon: a microwave and a toaster. There is no visible evidence of food whatsoever: no cookie jar, no glass canister of pretzel rods. Nothing.

I tiptoe in through the side door.

“Veronica?”

“Oh! Jesus, you scared me.” My mom is sitting at the kitchen table, reading a book. She neatly puts a tasseled bookmark in her place before looking up at me.

“How was work?” she asks.

“I, uh, fine.” I’m suddenly exhausted. It feels like I left the store about a decade earlier.

“Did you go out with your friends after work?” she asks hopefully.

“Uh, yeah, kinda.”

“I was thinking. Maybe you’d like to invite some of your friends over one of these evenings? To hang out, or watch a movie or something?”

“Look, Mom, I …”

“Veronica, have you been crying?”

I look down and see that she’s looking at me, actually looking at me. Her eyes have concern in them, concern that seems like maybe it is actually for me and not just about me. It’s very tempting.

“No,” I say.

She opens her mouth to say something. Then she shuts it and sort of frowns at me. I know she hates it when I won’t let her in, but somehow the more she tries, the more I want to pull back.

“This came for you today,” she says. And she hands me an envelope.

The postmark says
NEW YORK
.

Dad.

I flip it over and go to open the flap. Surprisingly, it gives way with no resistance. I’m pulling out the folded sheet inside when it dawns on me.

“Did you open this?”

“I—let me explain.”

“You opened my mail?!”

“Veronica, your father owes us, that is, he owes me some money. I wanted to see if he had enclosed a check. I didn’t read your letter, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t believe you!”

“Veronica, I told you. I looked for his check, nothing more.”

“That’s not the point. I can’t trust you! I can’t trust anyone!”

“Veronica—”

“Forget it! Just forget it!” I rip the letter in half, throw it and the envelope on the floor, and storm off to my room.

“Veronica?”

“Veronica, open the door.”

“Veronica, I need to talk to you. Please.”

“Veronica, if I have to stand here and talk to you through this door, I will. But I’d rather do this face to face. Please, open this door.”

“Fine, if you want to be stubborn, be stubborn. You come by it honestly.” She laughs ruefully.

“Sure, blame Dad!”

“Veronica, please. Open the door.”

I unlock it but retreat to my bed, where I resume my position: sprawled in a facedown flop. I can see in my closet door mirror that my face is red all over.

“Veronica, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s true.”

“You just don’t get it.”

“What don’t I get?”

“Forget it.”

“Veronica …”

“What?”

“I know things have been difficult for you lately.” She speaks slowly, deliberately. “You have no idea how hard it is to see you like this.”

“What,
fat
?”

“NO. Angry. Sad. Lonely.”

“Yeah, well, for your information, I’m not lonely. I have friends,” I insist.

“I know, you told me.”

“Yeah, well, I do. Good friends. Lots of them.”

“That’s great. Good friends are hard to come by.”

At which point I start to cry all over again.

“What’s wrong with me?” I finally say.

“Oh, sweetie,” she says, putting an arm around me. I shake her off.

“No, seriously,” I say, my voice getting shrill. “What is wrong with me? Nobody has wanted to be my friend since, like, forever. And now I finally meet people who seem sort of like they might actually like me. And then it turns out they don’t give a damn about me. Except maybe this one boy, but now I’m pretty sure he hates me, too.”

“Oh, honey. It’s going to be okay.” She tries to touch me again, but I turn on her.

“No, it’s
not
!” I snap. “It’s not going to be okay. Everything is so royally screwed up that it is never going to be okay ever again. And it is
all
my fault.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Don’t lie to me. I’m sick and tired of being lied to by
everyone. I’m sick of trusting people and having them trick me or laugh at me or lie to me or just plain leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says quietly.

“Great,” I snarl, turning my back on her.

“Veronica,” she tries again. “I am sorry that these people that you thought were your friends treated you so badly. But that does not mean you deserved it.”

I sit quietly for a while.

“I kind of deserved some of it,” I finally mutter. “I mean …” I groan. “I dunno. It’s just a big mess, okay?”

“I know.”

I shoot her a look.

“Okay, I can imagine,” she corrects herself.

“I’ve got news for you,” she continues. “Friendships—all relationships, really—can be messy. The people that are worth knowing are the ones that are willing to roll up their pants and wade through the mess with you.” This from the queen of sparkling countertops.

“What about Dad?”

“Sorry?”

“I mean, did things get too messy with him? Or did you just stop loving him, or what?”

“Veronica, no. Your father is just … that is, your father and I are just …” She looks like she’s struggling to figure out a less nasty way to say it. “We’re very different people. We always have been. And there just came a time when we realized we didn’t want the same things. I will always love your father, in a way.”

Right
, I think, rolling my eyes as she goes on. “But we just
weren’t really on the same page anymore, and it seemed best for both of us to go our separate ways.”

“Do I remind you of him?”

“Actually,” she says softly, “you remind me of me.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s true.”

“Oh, please. I don’t look anything like you.”

“I didn’t say you look like me. I said you
are
like me. In so many ways.”

“In
what
ways?”

My mom sighs and stares off past my ear. “When I first met your father, one of the things about him that completely impressed me was how passionate he was about the theater world. I’d never met anyone who knew so much and who spent so much time thinking and talking about any one thing before. It was really extraordinary.”

“Yeah. So?” It comes out harsher than I mean.

“I wasn’t like that at all. When I was your age, I was incredibly shy. I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do with my life, and even if I had known, I would have been terrified to stand up and say it out loud. So I let your father’s passion be my passion. We went to the flea markets together, collected together. For years.”

“You … you went to the fleas?”

“I did.” She smiles bashfully. “This was before you were born. I helped your father track down items, and I collected fabric for my sewing projects. Not seriously, like Ben.” Ben is my dad.

“So … what happened?”

“It’s like I said … your father and I are very different. He has always been satisfied by pursuing his interest in theater in that way. Owning little pieces of that world.”

She takes a deep breath. “Your father’s a good man. But he can be like an island sometimes, and he likes it that way. Me, I need people.”

“So Dad doesn’t need anyone?”

“No, I didn’t say that. He just prefers to keep people at a distance, you know what I mean? An emotional distance.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m more like Dad,” I say defiantly. “Maybe I don’t need people.”

My mom shakes her head. “I don’t think so, Veronica. I know you’ve had some rough times over the years. And I know you’ve gotten accustomed to spending time alone and pushing people away. But I don’t believe you’re actually happy like that. And I wish I could convince you that you deserve more than that.”

“I just … it’s not worth it …,” I stammer angrily. “I mean, there’s this boy …”

And I start to cry all over again. And then, without really planning to, I tell her about Len. And Zoe. And Ginger. And everything.

Well, almost everything.

Obviously, I leave out the juicy parts about me and Len. And the part about seeing Ginger and Bill making out in the stairwell. And about smoking pot with Bill. Also about going over to Bill’s house to watch movies earlier in the summer. I actually leave out quite a bit about Bill. Which is funny,
because he’s pretty much the only one left who I’m pretty sure I can actually trust. But I tell her most of the rest.

When I’m done, my mom kind of nods and looks like she’s thinking.

“It sounds to me like these girls have some self-esteem issues,” she finally says.

“Well, Ginger does,” I say.

“Sounds like both of them.”

“Not Zoe. If anything, she’s got too much self-esteem.”

“You’d be surprised,” she says lightly. “It also sounds like maybe you should give your friend Len a chance to explain,” she adds.

I wince, remembering my final rant in his backyard. Please tell me I didn’t say “and fuck your stupid fucking pets.” I mean, he was inside, but still. I have the uneasy feeling his whole freaking block heard me.

“Not likely,” I say.

“Give him time.”

I make a face.

After she leaves, I flop down on my bed, exhausted. There’s something about my mom—everything has to be a workout with her. Even conversation.

It’s so annoying how she thinks she knows everything. About Ginger and Zoe. And Len, for that matter.
Give him a chance to explain
. Explain what, exactly? He lied to me, he didn’t care about me, he dumped me. Story of my freaking life. Take my dad. When he moved to New York, he promised he’d call once a week. Turns out, in New York a week is
actually about six months long. I wonder if Mom thinks I should give him a chance to explain that, too?

Doubtful. If anyone’s more irritated at him than me, it’s her.

I flop from my stomach to my side, then my back. I stare at a crack in my ceiling that I’ve always wanted to pick at. I flop back onto my stomach and I grab my sketchbook. I flip through, looking for a blank page.

But on the way, I pass them. Sketches of Violet and Len. Violet in her sleeping bag. Len holding Violet.

Len’s hands.

Violet.

Len.

“Is it so impossible for you to believe that someone actually likes you for you? And maybe even likes you despite the way you act sometimes?”

Goddammit
. I rip out the page. And another. And another.
Fucking Nail, you freak. Who needs you?

Finally I come to a blank page. I pull one of my favorite dresses out of my closet—a seaweed-green bark cloth cocktail dress that looks like one of those outfits Maria von Trapp whipped up from her drapes—and hang it on the hinges of my door. I grab my pencil and try to sketch it, but I mess up. I keep trying again and again, but I just can’t seem to make it come out right.

“I don’t think you’re actually happy like that. I wish I could convince you that you deserve more than that.”

Fuck! Meaning what, exactly? Like she’s so happy with her perfect little life?
Although I guess maybe she is, now that I
think about it. She loves her students and loves performing, even if it is just for them. I mess up the drawing, then scribble all over it, then rip it out. I hate how I draw. I hate everything I do.
Why can’t I do anything right?

I rip and rip and rip. Page after page out of my sketchbook, crumpling and tossing and ripping and ripping. Until all that’s left are my sketches of Len and Violet. Pages and pages of Len and Violet.

I look down at a drawing of Len. I think about how he looked when he said that thing about liking me. About liking me
anyway
, even when I screw up or act like an asshole. There was something different when he said it, something I could feel. Was he scared?

Or could that have been me?

Len.

Violet.

And one blank page. Which I start in on, trying to draw the dress again, when—snap!—the point breaks off my pencil. In frustration, I throw it down.

But as I do, I notice something out of the corner of my eye. An envelope and two halves of a letter are sitting on the bed next to me. Where, I guess, my mom left them.

I piece them back together and read: