Chapter 11 Victoria #2
Thanksgiving at the Millers’ was not the joyful, raucous affair associated with the commercially wholesome holiday.
Instead, it consisted of what was perhaps the more common American tradition: an obligatory exchange of strained family dynamics over a meal that culminated in multiple stomachaches.
Sixteen-year-old Victoria dutifully helped her mother prepare for two days beforehand, not because she had any talent in the kitchen or interest in slopping Hamburger Helper into casserole trays, but because it was assumed of her, like her younger brother Jimmy was expected to glue himself to the couch next to their father and scream at the TV screen.
The difference was, Jimmy enjoyed his role.
Victoria had suggested to her mother that they might include something green this year to offset the sea of starches, and she did not take kindly to this, insulted that Victoria thought her casseroles (main ingredient: box or can), cream of mushroom soup, and stuffing dotted with crushed Lay’s potato chips (it looked like potpourri) needed any accompaniments.
The dining table would be dressed once again in its array of beige, white, and orange carbohydrates, like the Pilgrims had intended it.
When Victoria’s extended family arrived an hour later and they sat down for the meal, Victoria wished that she had come down with an acute case of smallpox.
Her cousin Kristine told everyone that she had seen Victoria entering the college counselor’s office that week.
Victoria and Kristine seldom crossed paths, and when they did, Kristine didn’t dare tarnish her patina of popularity by acknowledging her cousin who had no interest in normal teenage rituals like cutting class, giving hand jobs under the bleachers, and sneaking booze into school dances.
All heads turned to Victoria, who felt the burn of gazes threaded with judgment.
“You’re a junior,” Kristine accused.
“I have a lot of AP credits,” Victoria said simply, hoping her family would drop it rather than reveal that they didn’t know the significance of this. But the plan backfired. She saw annoyance sprout on her mother’s face; she probably thought Victoria was trying to make them feel dumb.
“What does that mean?” her mother snapped.
“I might be able to skip senior year and go straight to college.”
“You already skipped a year,” her dad said, like he didn’t understand why Victoria would want to do something unusual not just once, but twice. He had turned down a promotion the previous year, disinclined to take on a greater workload and responsibility.
“Seriously?” Kristine asked, unable to imagine the horror of not attending one’s senior prom.
“I get your room!” Jimmy yelped. “Can I, Dad? Can I have her room?”
“You wouldn’t live here?” Victoria’s aunt asked. “Where would you apply?”
“Stanford, Berkeley, USC, UCLA…” Victoria caught their looks and stopped reciting the rest of her college list. Her mother’s face assumed the color of an eggplant, a vegetable that had never graced that table.
“I’m not sure,” Victoria hedged. She looked at her mother and tried to change the topic. “The stuffing is great.” Her mother frowned, the deep grooves that probably had Victoria’s name on them carving themselves irrevocably into the topography of her mother’s face.
“My family is very simple,” Victoria told Liz. “They’re content with what they have, satisfied without needing more, which is obviously a good thing.” Victoria trailed off, not entirely sure how to phrase the rest of it.
“What’s the bad thing?” Liz asked.
“They looked down upon intellectual curiosity, drive, and ambition. All the qualities I had and they didn’t. They didn’t like that.” The truth was, they hadn’t liked her, or at least that’s how it felt.
“What would they have against ambition?” Liz asked.
“They couldn’t relate to it. I think they were threatened by anything that disrupted their status quo.
When they watched game shows every night, I’d go off to my room to read by myself and they’d roll their eyes.
They probably thought I looked down on them, but I couldn’t help being who I was, even if it was a rejection of everything they were. ”
“Do you still talk to them?”
“Quarterly check-ins,” Victoria said. “We’re as close as you can get to not having a relationship without being formally estranged.
I always call them, otherwise I’d never hear from them, and the conversations are always stilted and awkward.
What am I supposed to say to people who never told me they were proud of me for getting into Berkeley?
Who I didn’t invite to my wedding because… well, a lot of reasons.”
Liz looked at her. “Do they know?”
Victoria shook her head. “I told them I was getting married, but said we’d probably just go to the courthouse, and they didn’t ask any questions.”
“Do you think they would have come?”
“I don’t know,” Victoria said after several moments. “I told myself that I didn’t want to find out—I didn’t want to be disappointed again. But maybe I was equally scared of them showing up. I couldn’t bear to watch them see my life through their eyes.”
“I get that,” Liz said. “I know what it’s like to have someone not show up for you. Or to have them show up, but not in the way you need, and that’s almost worse.”
Victoria nodded, and wished she didn’t feel the same stirrings of emotion she always did when she thought about her family.
The pain of their rejection had once burned intensely, and while over time it had fermented into something less potent, or so she insisted to herself, it still stung.
The wound may have crusted over, but Victoria didn’t know if it would be like a bad knee that acted up when it was going to rain.
“I should probably let it go,” Victoria said, “but calling them every few months seems like something I should do, like getting a dental cleaning. I don’t expect anything anymore, though.
” It was true—Victoria had no expectations.
But if she was being completely honest with herself, Victoria was also still holding on to a sliver of hope, a vestigial token of her younger years, that one day her family would surprise her.
That their inability to relate to her wouldn’t impede their ability to love her.
“Look at us. It makes you think happy childhoods really are a myth,” Liz said.
“You don’t need Freud to figure out that my upbringing played a role in my ambivalence towards motherhood.”
Liz nodded. “I don’t want to do anything like Angela. Sometimes I get scared, though. What if I’m nothing like my child either? What if I can’t bond with my baby?”
“That scares me too,” Victoria said. “Motherhood scares me.”
“You don’t look like you’re scared of anything,” Liz said.
“Plenty of things,” Victoria said. “Bad Botox, for one.”
Liz laughed.
“Hazard of being in LA, though.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure I belong here, but at least I’m more used to it now,” Liz said.
“This city is strange. But it also has a strange magic. There’s a beautiful alchemy that’s possible in Los Angeles that you can’t find in other places.”
“They should talk about that on those star tours instead of pointing out where O. J. Simpson used to live,” Liz said.
“That’s a stop?” Victoria asked.
“They tore down the house. But they show you where it used to be, in Brentwood,” Liz said. “Probably not during the regular tour. My friend Freya made us do a true crime tour for her birthday one year.”
“Was it fun?” Victoria asked.
“No, it was weird and creepy. But she was fresh off a breakup with a guy who had a raging coke problem, so she said murder matched her mood more than champagne.”
“Aside from the murder tours, which are obviously enticement enough,” Victoria said, “why did you move here?”
“I was into film and I lucked into a job through my college’s alumni network. But I think moving to California was always my secret goal, deep down.”
“Why was it a secret?”
“I knew my father lived in California,” Liz said. “But I couldn’t tell Angela that I still thought about this person who had abandoned us when I was a kid. She would’ve lost her shit.”
“You knew where your dad lived?” Victoria asked.
“I used to let myself Google him once a year, on my birthday. It was like some form of internet emotional cutting, but I stopped when I turned thirty. I told myself I was too old for that. No good had come out of it—or would.”
“You never considered contacting him?”
“No,” Liz said, shaking her head so that her ponytail swung emphatically. “That’s not why I came here. I wasn’t ever going to hit him up and be like, ‘Remember me, the kid you wanted nothing to do with?’ ”
“Why not? You could get some closure, at least.”
“I honestly never even considered it. My shrink says that wanting to move here was probably a subconscious choice—the pull of a place that had intrinsic value. The thing—the life—he chose over me.”
Victoria processed this, trying and failing to keep her face a blank slate.
“It could be worse,” Liz said. “I didn’t wind up on a pole.”
Victoria laughed, and then, as if they both needed to focus on less mentally taxing subjects, the conversation turned to their first impressions of Dawn’s class and the cliques of disciples that had already formed.
“How about that group chat?” Liz said.
Victoria remembered that after she had joined Dawn’s class, she had received an invitation to join the WhatsApp group. She had mentally set it aside and promptly disregarded it.
“I completely forgot,” she said, pulling out her phone from her jacket pocket. Victoria navigated to WhatsApp and made a face at the group name: Dawn’s October Mommies. It was accompanied by a string of pregnant-woman emojis.
Victoria scrolled through. “Two hundred and sixty-seven messages!” she exclaimed.
“You haven’t looked at it at all?”
“No. Why are there two hundred and sixty-seven messages? What can these women possibly be texting so much about?” Victoria looked through the barrage of messages, picking up key words here and there.
“ ‘Who’s getting the Snoo?’ ” Victoria read.
“ ‘To Nanit or not to Nanit?’ ‘Anyone have reccos for hypoallergenic onesies? TIA.’ ”
Liz made a face, expressing a sentiment that Victoria felt on a visceral level. Victoria kept reading: “ ‘What bottles are you ladies getting? TIA’…TIA, TIA, TIA. What’s TIA?”
“Thanks in advance,” Liz said.
Victoria’s head shot up. “Thanks in advance? Why do they say that? And how do I unsubscribe from the group chat?”
“Please don’t leave me alone in there,” Liz said. “TIA.”
Victoria laughed. “Please don’t say that again. TIA.”
They spent the walk back finding ways to insert TIA into various contexts. Please don’t cum inside me, TIA. Extra mustard and ketchup, TIA. Kindly go fuck yourself, TIA.
When they reached their cars, Liz’s mood seemed to downshift. Victoria noticed that she looked pensive and was chewing her bottom lip.
“What is it?” Victoria asked. “I know we got off on the wrong foot at brunch, but I promise you can tell me anything. I won’t overstep.”
“I’ve been thinking…about my job…”
Victoria nodded and tried to keep her face neutral. While mentally, of course, she was plunging into a PowerPoint presentation to chart the course forward, she forced herself to stay mum and allow Liz to lead the charge.
“I can’t quit without having something else lined up. And obviously, this is the worst time to be trying to change jobs.” Liz pointed to her pregnant body. “I have to be responsible about this. But I do want to see what else is out there.”
“Yes! I mean—good idea.”
“I had a feeling you’d say that.”
“I’ve never been good at hiding my opinions,” Victoria said. “I also know, even though it didn’t come across initially, that passion and a paycheck don’t always go hand in hand.”
“You’re lucky that they do for you,” Liz said.
“I am. Is my job always ideal, though? No. I really wanted to be named managing director of my firm but it went to a self-impressed, backstabbing weasel.”
“Why do the douchebags always win?” Liz lamented. Victoria was touched by her new friend’s automatic loyalty.
Liz frowned, and Victoria was worried she had overstepped again, but then Liz asked, “Would you take a look at my résumé? If the offer still stands?”
“Of course. Anything I can do to help.”
“TIA,” Liz said with a small smile.
“TIA,” Victoria told her back.