as far as I can tell she hasn’t left the house in a week,” he said. “Should I do something?”
What was there to do? Her moods changed, they had always changed, but they had never broken her entirely; she always came back. “Talk to Dad?” I offered.
“He’s never here. Only on the weekends, if he makes it up here at all.”
I cringed. “Look, I’ll deal with it.”
“Really? Awesome. You’re the best.” I could almost feel his relief flooding the line.
But it was midterms and I was desperately behind in my classes so I didn’t have the bandwidth to properly address the drama back home; the thought of my mother’s storm cycles, endlessly repeating themselves, exhausted me. So “dealing with it” meant giving my mom a call, a half-hearted test probe: I’m going to ask if you are doing OK and please give me the answer I want to hear.
And she did. “Oh, honestly, I’m fine.” She snipped off her syllables with neat, patrician bites; I heard my own voice mirrored in hers, the lack of California in our accents. (No valley drawl in my family; no surfer slang for us!) “It’s just a little tiring, all this snow. I’d forgotten how much hassle it is.”
“What are you doing with yourself? Are you bored?”
“Bored?” There was a slight intake of breath on the other end of the line, a hiss of annoyance. “Not at all. I’m working on ideas for redecorating this place. Your grandmother had such awful taste, so baroque and kitsch. I’m thinking of flying out an appraiser and putting some of it up for auction. Selecting some pieces that are more appropriate to the period of the estate.”
It should have been reassuring, but I could hear it in my mother’s voice, the stutter of exhaustion, the effort it was taking her to sound lively and alert. A miasma hung around her, of thick inertia. And by the time I came home for spring break a month later, she’d slipped into the next phase in the cycle: the hyperactive one. I felt it in the air the minute I stepped inside Stonehaven: the cool crackle of tension, the brittle edge to my mother’s movements as she passed from one room to the next. My first night in town, the four of us sat around the formal dining table for dinner and my mother chattered away at high speed about her redecorating plans while my father tuned her out completely, like she was a static channel on the TV. Before dessert was even served, he’d pulled his phone out of his pocket, frowned at a message, and excused himself from the table. In a minute, the headlights from his Jaguar illuminated Maman’s face through the window, as he headed down the drive. Her eyes were dilated and unseeing.
My brother and I gave each other meaningful looks across the table. Here we go again.
The next morning, Benny and I escaped Stonehaven with the excuse that we were going to get coffee in town. As we stood in line at a café, I kept sneaking glances at my brother. He held himself with a strange new confidence, his shoulders straighter, as if for once he wasn’t trying to disappear. It appeared that he had finally learned to wash his face, and his acne was clearing. He looked good, and yet there was something distracted and aimless about him that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.
I was jet-lagged and distracted myself, which is probably why I didn’t pay much attention to the girl that Benny was talking to at the café. She had materialized in line in front of us, an unremarkable teenager in ill-fitting clothes that failed to disguise her heaviness, and thick black makeup that masked whatever natural prettiness lurked underneath. Her hair was pink, a home dye job; I had to look away to avoid staring at the mess she’d made of herself. Her mother, hovering nearby, was her physical opposite: blond, overtly sexy, and trying too hard. Benny’s poor friend needs a makeover and some self-esteem, and clearly her mom isn’t the one to give it to her, I thought idly, and then my phone began to vibrate with messages from friends back East.