I realize it’s not just Willem I’m looking for; it’s Lulu, too.
Twenty-five
APRIL
Miami Beach
Mom and Dad are waiting for me at my gate in the Miami airport, Mom having arranged for their flight to get in a half hour before mine. I’d hoped I might have gotten out of this year’s Passover Seder. I just saw Mom and Dad for spring break a few weeks ago, and coming down for Seder means taking a day off from school. But no such luck. Tradition is tradition, and Passover is the one time of year we go to Grandma’s.
I love Grandma, and even if the Seders are always mind-numbingly dull and you take your life in your own hands eating so much of Grandma’s home cooking, that’s not why I dread them.
Grandma makes Mom crazy, which means that whenever we’re visiting, Mom makes us crazy. When Grandma visits us at home, it’s dealable. Mom can get away, go vent to Susan, play tennis, organize the calendar, go to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe I don’t need. But when we’re at Grandma’s old-people condo in Miami Beach, it’s like being trapped on a geriatric island.
Mom starts in on me at the baggage claim, sniping at me for not sending thank-you notes out for my birthday presents, which means she must have asked Grandma and Susan if they’d gotten theirs. Because other than Jenn and Kali—who baked me a cake—and Dee—who took me out to his favorite food truck in Boston for dinner—and Mom and Dad, of course, there was no one else to send thank-you cards to this year. Melanie didn’t send anything. She just posted a greeting on my Facebook page.
Once we get into a cab (the second one, Mom having rejected the first one because the AC was too weak—no one is safe from Mom when she’s on a Grandma trajectory)—she starts in on me about my summer plans.
Back in February, when she first brought this up, asking what I was going to do over the summer, I told her I had no idea. Then, a few weeks later, at the end of spring break, she announced that she had made some inquiries on my behalf and used some connections and now had two promising offers. One is working in a lab at one of the pharmaceutical companies near Philadelphia. The other is working in one of Dad’s doctor friend’s offices, a proctologist named Dr. Baumgartner (Melanie used to call him Dr. Bum-Gardner). Neither job would be paid, she explained, but she and Dad had discussed it and decided they’d counter the loss with a generous allowance. She looked so pleased with herself. Both jobs would look excellent on my résumé, would go a long way toward offsetting what she referred to as the “debacle” of my first term.
I’d been so irritated, I’d almost told her that I couldn’t take those internships because I wasn’t qualified; I wasn’t pre-med. Just to spite her. Just to see the look on her face. But then I’d gotten scared. I was getting an A in Shakespeare Out Loud. An A minus in Mandarin, which was a first for me. A solid B in my biology class and labs, and an A in ceramics. I realized I was actually proud of how well I was doing in my classes and I didn’t want Mom’s inevitable and perennial disappointment to poison that. But that was going to happen no matter what, though I was sticking to my plan A—to show her my final grades when I made the announcement.
But finals are still three weeks away, and Mom is breathing down my neck right now about these jobs. So as we pull into Grandma’s high-rise, I tell her that I’m still mulling it over and then I skip out of the cab to help Dad with the bags.
It’s so strange. Mom is the most formidable person I know, but when Grandma opens the door, Mom seems to shrink, as if Grandma is some ogre instead of a five-foot bottle blonde in a yellow tracksuit and a KISS THE MESHUGGENEH COOK apron. Grandma grabs me in a fierce hug that smells of Shalimar and chicken fat. “Ally! Let me look at you! You’re doing something different with your hair! I saw the pictures on Facebook.”
“You’re on Facebook?” Mom asks.
“Ally and I are friends, aren’t we?” She winks at me.
I see Mom wince. I’m not sure if it’s because Grandma and I are FB friends or because Grandma insists on shortening my name.
We step inside. Grandma’s boyfriend, Phil, is asleep on the big floral couch. A basketball game blares from the giant television.
Grandma touches my hair. It’s to my shoulders now. I haven’t cut it since last summer. “It was shorter before,” I say. “It’s sort of in between.”
“It’s better than it was. That bob was awful!” Mom says.
“It was a bob, Mom. Not a Mohawk.”
“I know what it was. But it made you look like a boy.”
I turn to Grandma. “Was she traumatized by a bad haircut in her youth? Because she seems unwilling to let this go.”
Grandma claps her hands. “Oh, Ally, you might be right. When she was ten, she saw Rosemary’s Baby and begged me to take her to the children’s beauty parlor. She kept making the lady go shorter until it was all off, and as we were leaving the salon, another mother pointed Ellie out to her son and said, ‘Why don’t you get a haircut like that nice little boy?’” She looks at Mom, smiling. “I didn’t realize that still upset you, Ellie.”
“It doesn’t upset me, because it never happened, Mother. I never saw Rosemary’s Baby. And if I had, at ten, that would’ve been entirely inappropriate, by the way.”
“I can show you the pictures!”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Grandma eyes Mom’s hair. “You might think of trying that pixie again now. I think you’ve been wearing the same style since Bill Clinton was president.” Grandma gives another wicked grin.
Mom seems to shrink another inch as she touches her hair—straight, brown, in a low ponytail. Grandma leaves her like that, pulling me into the kitchen. “You want some cookies? I have some macaroons.”
“Macaroons are not cookies, Grandma. They’re coconut cookie substitutes. And they’re disgusting.” Grandma doesn’t keep anything in the house with flour during Passover.
“Let’s see what else I have.” I follow Grandma into the kitchen. She pours me some of her diet lemonade. “Your mom is having such a hard time,” Grandma says. When Mom’s out of sight, she’s sympathetic, almost defending her, like I was the one who riled her up.
“I don’t see why. She has a charmed life.”
“Funny, that’s what she says about you whenever she thinks you’re being ungrateful.” Grandma opens the oven door to check on something. “She’s having a hard time adjusting, with you being gone. You’re all she’s got.”
I feel a pit in my stomach. Another way I’ve let Mom down.