I say, “Fine.” The second after I say it, though, I remember that she always tells me that “fine” really stands for Effed-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and I can’t remember what the e is supposed to mean. Evil? Evasive?
“Too bad they don’t have room service.” She leafs through some flyers on the nightstand. “What sounds good? Pizza? Thai food? Oh, look, there’s a place that delivers sushi. You choose.”
“Mom, we just ate.”
“All I had was a salad. And you hardly touched your burger. Come on, we’re on vacation. Let’s live a little. What about sushi? Sushi was always your favorite.”
Yeah, when I was in middle school, and it was mostly always Twyla’s favorite. Macaroni and cheese was my favorite.
She picks up the remote and starts flipping around the channels. “Oh, hey, Aubrey, look, Mystery Science Theater. They’re doing Hercules.”
Mystery Science used to be a staple of our Friday-night dates. I remember when she rented the one playing now, a fifties epic set in ancient Rome. We baked brownies with expensive Belgian chocolate, she drank her kangaroo wine, we snuggled up together under a quilt and laughed at the snarky comments the narrators made about how cheesy Steve Reeves was all shaved and oiled up and flashing his six-pack in a minitoga, and I thought she was the funniest, coolest mom in the entire world. For one second, I wish that brownies and a movie with Mom were still the most fun I could imagine having.
“I thought they were supposed to have free Wi-Fi in all the rooms,” I say the third time my connection gets dropped.
“Maybe if you sat closer to the patio doors.”
“Maybe if it wasn’t pouring rain, I could sit on the patio. But it is pouring rain and it appears it will always be pouring rain.”
“It’s not ‘pouring rain.’ The English would call this kind of weather ‘soft.’ And besides, that is one of the things you liked about Peninsula. A completely different climate.”
The word “whatever” forms in my brain without my willing it to. I can tell from her expression that Mom reads it like a thought bubble above my head.
She makes it almost five minutes without saying anything, then starts sighing, and finally announces, “I’m PMSing madly.”
I force myself not to respond to her unbelievably irritating comment. Mom has this idea that our periods are synced up the way some study she read a couple of decades ago says happens to sorority girls. What she is actually saying is that I am a moody, irrational bitch, but that it is OK because she is getting her period too and understands and excuses me.
I remember something from my human development class sophomore year about how, at first, babies don’t understand that their foot or their hand belongs to them and isn’t just another part of the alien world they’ve been dumped into. Before they figure out where they stop and the world begins, they also think that their mother’s bodies are part of their bodies.
They need to add a section to that chapter about how some mothers never get past the developmental stage of thinking that their daughter’s body is actually theirs.
I shut the laptop and say as pleasantly as I can, “I think I’ll try downstairs.”
“Good idea,” my mom bursts out. “They might still have cookies left. They’re supposed to put cookies out in the afternoon.”
“Yeah, OK. Cool. I’ll bring some back.”
“Chocolate chip!” she yells after me.
The instant I get into the motel stairwell, I plop down, open the laptop, and play and replay Tyler’s interview. Especially the part where he calls the kid with the microphone “son.”
I feel like a sad Justin Bieber fan. And even though I am, in a pathetically literal, emo-poetry sort of way, between floors, for the only time that whole horrible day, while I listen to Tyler’s voice, I feel like I am exactly where I belong.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
I run back into the house to get the trust agreement. In the short time I’ve been gone, the house has stopped being mine. When I step into the great room, it’s as if I’d just walked in for the first time with the Realtor, lifted my face to the high windows far above me, put my hand on my pregnant belly, and fallen in love with the weightless feeling of a room with a ceiling I couldn’t have touched standing on a chair.
The great room.
I traded Aubrey’s life, the life she should have had in the city with a swirling