Why Can't I Be You (7 page)

But then a week before school started, my mom called my dad when his alimony check was late, and a woman picked up the phone. My mom stopped grocery shopping. She ran to the store every couple of days but came back with paper bags that clinked when she carried them up the stairs to her bedroom.

She left money on the counter and expected me to order dinner every night. I ate cold Chinese food for breakfast. I tried to rotate our takeout orders so she wouldn’t get mad at me for ordering pizza too many times or not enough or, worse, decide that she didn’t want what I’d ordered and get in the car to go pick something else up. I’d been both the passenger on those car rides and the one sitting by the phone, waiting to hear her car in the garage, my breathing getting shallow if I happened to hear sirens off in the distance. So I kept a calendar in my room, taped to the underside of my desk blotter, and used color-coded dots to remind me what we’d already ordered that week. Red for Chinese, green for Italian, blue for salads from the pizza place, yellow for chicken wings.

She didn’t eat much anyway. Like she was on a hunger strike or trying to out-skinny whoever my dad might start dating next. Like she was trying to disappear. When I took the garbage out on Sunday nights, I bagged all her bottles in opaque black plastic so no one would see them in the recycling bin.

I had to make excuses for why Sheila and the Rachels couldn’t come over anymore. When Sheila said, “Did you see Johnny Depp on the cover of
US Weekly
? I can’t wait to come over and read it!” I told her that my mom was redecorating and there were paint fumes. That only worked for about two weeks, and then it just compounded the lie, because not only did my mom spend all day in her room, watching soap operas in her nightgown, but we didn’t have freshly painted walls and new slipcovers on the couch cushions. We had a big stack of mail on the kitchen table, newspapers piled in the hallway, and dirty dishes all over the house. For a few weeks, I smuggled the magazines to Sheila at school, hoping that being her supplier of Johnny and Kate gossip would count for something, but it wasn’t the same. I was weird. I was lying. They shared their secrets, and I wasn’t sharing mine. I felt like they could tell.

Eventually, I stopped getting invited to their houses. They made plans without me. I could never get my mom to take me to the store to buy me the right kind of sneakers or hair clips. One day in October, they sat at a lunch table that only had three open seats. They didn’t even look back apologetically or anything. They just sat there and went on with their perfect little teenage lives, and I didn’t exist anymore. They didn’t skip a beat.

It’s not like it really mattered. Between schoolwork and trying to keep the house clean and our bills paid with alimony and child support so the electricity wouldn’t get shut off again, I didn’t have time to have friends anymore anyway.

Sometimes I couldn’t help but think, if only my dad had sent the check on time. If only he’d had the good sense to tell Cheryl not to pick up the phone at his place, if only he’d walked on eggshells like we were supposed to, I’d have been wearing a pink scrunchie and Tretorns with a matching pink stripe, sitting with the rest of the Four Amigos, laughing when Rachel K. snarfed Diet Coke out of her nose right in front of Trent Wilner. I wouldn’t have gotten stuck sitting at the loser table, where no one talked to anyone and we all averted our eyes to hide the embarrassment we felt for not having anywhere else to sit, for even existing.

Sometimes I still believed the person my mother was that summer before high school was the person she most wanted to be. Sometimes I still missed her.

Myra and I finished every little last bit of our room service order.

“Oh,” Myra said, holding her stomach. “That was amazing! I’ve been so busy with the store. It’s been a while since I’ve had a real meal! Thank you, Jess!”

“No problem,” I said, picking up the tray and carrying it to the hallway.

Myra got up and opened the doors to the balcony. The sound of water rushing over the falls behind the lodge filled the room. “Wow, Jess! Have you been out here yet?”

I put the tray outside the door and met her on the balcony. The air was damp and smelled like pine trees. And if you stood on the left side of the balcony and looked out to the right, you could see Snoqualmie Falls.

“This room is amazing,” she said.

There was a citronella candle and a book of matches on the little cast-iron table next to the balcony chairs. Myra lit it, and I ran inside to make coffee in the mini coffeemaker on the dresser.

We sat out on the balcony, clutching our mugs for warmth. It wasn’t freezing, but it wasn’t exactly balmy.

“When we were kids, did you ever think we’d be here?” Myra asked.

“No,” I said. It was truthful at least.

“So, who are you now?” she asked. “You seem different. You’re not as frantic. You listen.” She waved her arms around. “You’re not bouncing off the walls. What changed?”

“Everything.” The cool air made goose bumps on my arms.

“Where were you?” Myra asked, leaning back in her chair and putting her feet up on the railing.

“Just living life, I guess,” I said. It was lame, but I couldn’t think of what else to say. I didn’t know where everything left off for her and Jessie.

There were a few stars peeking out from behind the clouds.

“Where did you end up going to college?”

“Ithaca,” I said, because if she didn’t know where Jessie had gone, I might as well be honest about all the other details of my life. “The college, not Cornell.”

“Well, yeah,” she said, laughing. “There’s no way you had the grades for Cornell.”

For some stupid reason, I was offended. I wanted to tell her that I had gotten good grades in high school. I’d even gotten a scholarship. But she wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about Jessie Morgan’s grades.

“So where do you live now?” she asked. “I can’t believe I don’t even know.”

“Rochester,” I said.

“Minnesota?”

“New York.”

“But not like New York, New York,” Myra said. “Right?”

“More like south of Toronto, New York.”

“Is it freezing cold all the time?”

“Yeah. In the winter. But you get used to it.” Of course, I’d lived in Rochester my whole life. I was born used to it. But it was something to say. Something benign.

“I didn’t even know you applied to Ithaca. We checked everywhere we could think of. Me and Fish. We even e-mailed some girl named Jessica Morgan at Florida State, and a J. Morgan at the U of O. We thought maybe one of them was you, but neither of them wrote back.”

She looked at me, and the way her forehead wrinkled and her eyes looked so sad made me wish I could have somehow pretended to be Jessie then too. I would have written back, said something kind, ended the wonder.

“Why did you leave us?” Myra said. “I mean, if it’s okay to ask.”

“Of course it’s okay to ask,” I said. “But I don’t know if I have a good answer.”

“Was it everything with your parents?” Myra said softly.

“Yeah,” I said. I thought about everything with my parents. If I’d had the guts and the chance to disappear from everything they were, from all the weight they dumped on me—cleaning up after my drunk mom, pretending my dad didn’t have a new girlfriend every weekend—I might have left. I might have never told anyone where I was going. “It was just too much, you know?”

Myra put her arm around me and leaned her head on my shoulder. “You didn’t have to leave me, you know. You could have told me. Any secret in the world, I would have kept for you.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. You know the thing I’ve learned the most? That everything looks different when you’re a kid. It’s like Alice in Wonderland. Nothing is as it seems, and then you get older and get to decide if you want to go back and see everything the way it really is or if you just want to move on.”

“So which is it?” I asked. “What are you supposed to decide?”

“I’m not sure,” Myra said. “Remains to be seen, I guess. If you poke at a sore spot, do you stop feeling the hurt or does it get worse?”

“What’s your sore spot?” I asked, eager to steer the conversation away from me. The less I talked about myself, the less likely I was to screw up and say something that would give me away.

“That I didn’t go to FIT. That I stayed behind for John.” She sighed and grabbed her mug. “I think I overcompensate for it now. I live like a monk. All I do is work. Like I need to prove to the world that I’m not the kind of girl who gives up everything for a boy. Now I’m, like, romantically impaired. I don’t know if I know how to be in a relationship. I don’t know if I’ve left room for one.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “maybe we do things for the wrong reason, but we end up with the right result. At least I hope it works that way.”

Myra shook her head like she didn’t want to think about herself anymore. “What’s your sore spot?”

“I think maybe I try so hard to be who everyone wants me to be, I don’t know who I want to be.”

“But you’re Jessie
Fucking
Morgan.”

I reached for my coffee mug and clinked it against Myra’s instead of answering. “To falling down the rabbit hole,” I said.

“Drink me,” Myra said, wiggling her mug back and forth like it was talking to her.

If I could make up a dream friend to have gone through high school with, she would end up being exactly like Myra. Actually, if I could make up a dream friend to go through adulthood with, it would be Myra too.

We stayed up talking until three a.m., fell asleep on the big king-sized bed, and had room service breakfast on the balcony. We spent every waking moment talking about life and jobs, who we are now, how we were both still waiting to feel like grown-ups, and this hot guy who owns the coffee shop next to Myra’s store. And I didn’t feel self-conscious. I didn’t feel like I had to pretend I never get morning breath or sleep in my eyes. I didn’t feel like everything that came out of my mouth had to be funny or clever. Even though I knew it was completely bizarre, I felt like it was okay to just be me when I hung out with Myra.

M
y life didn’t
really start until college.

I got to go away to school. My mom was going to make me live at home and go someplace local, but my dad said that Ithaca wasn’t far and it would be good for me to have a little bit of distance. His proclamation was, of course, followed by my mother shouting, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” and then yelling and screaming until my dad finally said, “Thank God I don’t have to listen to this shit anymore,” and slammed the door behind him hard enough to make the windows rattle.

For weeks after that, I was the enemy and I had to tread lightly. I’d learned to read every single smidge of a warning sign. There were clues in her tone, in the subtle movements at the corners of her lips when she talked. She had a twitch that sprung from her left eyebrow when the tide was about to turn. A simple conversation would devolve into a lecture about how selfish I was, what a hardship sending me away to school was going to be, how no one ever thought about her needs. I was ungrateful. I didn’t know how much she’d given up for me. I made things hard for her with my father. She wondered sometimes if her life would have been better if she hadn’t had a child. Her words smelled like bourbon.

But in the end I got to go away to school. If my mother hadn’t let me, she’d be proving my father right on some level, and she couldn’t let that happen.

My roommate, Yarah, was from Brazil and used to tell me that she felt like an eight-legged sea creature around American college kids. I never told her that I felt that way too.

The first time it snowed, Yarah and two girls from California who lived on the third floor ran outside in their pajamas and stared in amazement. I did too, even though Rochester is one of the snowiest cities in the country. The snow in Ithaca felt different, exciting. We twirled around on the quad and tipped our heads back to catch flakes on our tongues.

After they went to bed, I sat in the TV lounge and watched the way the snow stuck to the tree in front of our dorm. It felt like the first time I’d ever really seen snow. I snuck back into my room and grabbed my coat and walked around campus alone, taking in the silence the snow brought with it, the big clumpy flakes falling in the streetlight, and the fact that I had the freedom to watch the snow any way I wanted.

I was shy and quiet. I watched people more than I was a part of anything. But for the first time, I was starting to live. I worked at the college art gallery and sketched in my notebook while I monitored the sign-in sheet. I took the bus into town and read about the Maasai in Tanzania over steaming cups of espresso in a small dark coffee shop in the Commons. I had freedom.

In my spare time, I mostly hung out with Yarah. She was a violin major, and she practiced as much as I did homework. Late at night, when we were done working, we’d eat ice cream in the TV lounge and watch
Welcome Back, Kotter
reruns on Nick at Nite. Yarah was never drunk. She never had harsh words for me. We were polite to each other, careful, and our room was a safe, simple, happy place. It was the first teeny-tiny little hint that life didn’t always have to be what it had been.

Luanne lived down the hall from me junior year. She was this loud girl from Larchmont whose mom sent her care packages filled with fancy perfume and cigarettes. We were in most of the same comm. classes, but we weren’t friends. When her mom came to visit, she’d take half the dorm to Joe’s for dinner. I was never invited. I was never one of the girls who came home with a Styrofoam box of eggplant parm to eat in the TV lounge the next day.

My mom never sent me care packages. She never came to visit either. A two-hour drive may as well be a trek across the Sahara on a camel to a mom who’s always drunk or hungover. She never came to visit me and I didn’t have a car, so for four years, in between major holidays and her obsessively needy, almost daily phone calls, I got to be someone other than Marie Shaw’s daughter. Second semester freshman year, I decided I needed to pursue a double major: communications and anthropology. Sophomore year, I picked up the studio art minor. It meant I got to spend my summers at school too.

Sometimes on Sundays, when Yarah had to put in time at the practice rooms, I’d go with her. I’d sit on the floor in the hallway, turning my knees into an easel, drawing while I listened to Yarah’s violin mix with all the other music pouring into the hallway. I made vows to myself about what my life would be.

I was going to find a job at a big PR firm in New York City after I graduated. I’d have a little loft, work on my paintings on the side. Take slides to galleries on my days off. It was a practical plan, but it left room for dreaming.

But by the time I graduated, the economy was in the toilet. I couldn’t even get interviews with New York firms. I did, however, get an interview at Levi & Plato. So did Luanne. It was my only offer, and I took it. I think Luanne had a choice between Levi & Plato and an unpaid internship in Yonkers, so she took the job too.

Luanne didn’t know anyone in Rochester, so suddenly we were “old friends from college.” Yarah moved back to São Paulo after graduation, and even though I had my own apartment, I was sucked back into the vortex of taking care of my mother when I wasn’t working, so I was more than happy to be Luanne’s dear old friend. Having Luanne drag me out for drinks at Pearl on Thursday nights was easier than trying to set up some vague semblance of the life I’d wanted for myself. I forgot all over again that I had choices. I got good at being my mother’s daughter and Luanne’s friend. I still painted on Sunday afternoons—it was a vestige of who I’d wanted to be. But then I met Deagan, my paints went to storage, and I spent Sundays on the sidelines at the indoor beach volleyball courts, breathing in the smell of too many bare feet, playing the good girlfriend to the best of my abilities. I didn’t even complain when he tracked sand through my apartment after the game.

So many years later, I still wished I’d told Yarah that I felt like an eight-legged sea creature around all the other college kids too. I wished I could have let myself be better friends with her, instead of carefully keeping a little bit of distance between us. I told myself it was the language barrier, but it was my barrier. Yarah’s English was perfect.