to board, Dad knelt down and squeezed me so hard that I felt him shaking.
“You be good, kiddo,” he said, forcing a smile. “Love you.”
My body suddenly turned cold. I felt something rip inside my stomach as Dad sank into an airport chair and Mom tugged me toward the door leading to the plane. This wasn’t right. Dad was supposed to come with us. Mom pulled me by the arm as I leaned in the opposite direction, unwilling to take another step without Dad.
“Come ON,” she huffed.
“What about Dad?” I demanded, digging in my heels. But she was stronger, and I was forced to hop in her direction as I struggled against her weight.
“Don’t make a scene.”
I let myself go slack. Conversation around me became muffled, like I was underwater. I fell silent, feeling myself get pulled into the breezeway, and when I looked back to find Dad, there were too many people behind me, blocking my view. My mind swirled as I let Mom steer me down the aisle and into a window seat, where I pressed my forehead to the chilly oval until I saw a tall figure with ink-black hair and plaid pants standing behind the plate glass of the terminal. Dad looked like he was in a television. I lifted my hand, but he didn’t see me. He didn’t move from his spot as the plane pushed back from the gate. I kept my eyes locked on him until he became smaller and smaller, until the plane turned away.
During the flight, Mom blew smoke at the folding tray in front of her and picked at her copper-colored nail polish with trembling hands. She seemed to be crumbling. I snuck peeks at her while pretending to draw in the coloring book the stewardess had given me. Mom still looked pretty to me, but her skin seemed grayer under the overhead light. At home, she was careful about the way she looked, and never went outside without first covering her freckles with beige cream and putting shimmery blue shadow on her eyes. I liked to watch her ritual, and all the tools that came with it. A blow-dryer to make her short curly hair stand up higher, fat brushes to put pink powder on her cheeks, and that clamper thing she squeezed on her eyelashes to curl them up. Sometimes she’d let me choose her lipstick from dozens of tubes she kept in the bathroom. The final touch was a cloud of smelly spray all around her head, to make her hair stay in place.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a little chubby, as long as you have a pretty face,” she’d say, threading gold wire hoops through her ears. She never left the house without her movie-star sunglasses, two big brown circles as large as drink coasters.
Mom had some rolls around her middle but her legs were thin, so she covered her shape with dresses that had busy designs and loud colors. The dresses stopped above her knee, which made her look like a bouquet of flowers on two stems. I thought she was beautiful. My favorite part of watching her get dressed was when she picked out her shoes. She kept a row of heels in a perfect line on her closet floor, toes facing in, in every color of the rainbow. I wasn’t allowed to touch her things, but I admired her footwear, imagining myself perched high like a lady, strutting down the sidewalk to my grown-up job. Once she’d put on her outfit, she’d turn left and right in the mirror and ask me if she looked fat. I never thought so, but she always looked disappointed when she looked at her reflection.
At least once a month, she got dressed up to visit the Vanderbilt mansion. The towering limestone “summer cottage” had seventy rooms and looked like six houses pushed together, perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. It was a five-minute drive from our apartment, and we entered through the wrought-iron gates, Mom’s dress rustling softly and Charlie perfume wafting behind her, as she pushed Matthew in the stroller past topiaries clipped to scientifically precise triangles, the pea gravel pathway crunching underfoot. We never went inside for the tour, but we had our favorite bench where Mom had a view of the top floor windows. My brother picked pebbles out for me to throw into the garden fountains as she conducted surveillance on the windows, hoping for a glimpse of one of the heirs