Chapter 47
AFTER THE FOURTH SUMMER, TWELVE YEARS AGO, WINTER brEAK
“I’m not learning anything,” Didion said, hovering in the doorway of her mother’s bedroom.
Babe shut her eyes and put an earring into her left lobe. “Didion, we are not having this conversation again.”
“It’s a huge waste of money. I’m just getting drunk and then going to forty-five-minute classes and talking about what the green light means in The Great Gatsby.
Like, we know, it represents how untouchable Daisy is and how she’s just a faint glimmering hope he has that he can never reach.
I talked about it in sophomore year of high school and here we are, doing it again! ”
“Then it should be easy!” said Babe, taking the last sip from her glass, ice rattling.
Didion rolled her eyes. “That is so not the point.”
“Then what is the point, exactly, hon, because it sounds like you’re complaining about being in college. Which is a luxury many people will never have.”
“It’s a total waste! I’m never going to do anything that requires a college degree, it’s pointless.”
“It helps with everything!”
“It doesn’t help with cooking!”
Babe scoffed. “Did I make it look that glamorous? You want to be a cook that bad?”
“I don’t want to cook because it’s glamorous, I want to be a chef because I love it.”
“So then what? You want to open your own restaurant? Do you know how hard that is?”
“Maybe! I don’t know, but it’s the talent I have, so that’s the one I want to use.”
“It’s not. Happening!”
“I’m an adult!”
“You are. But if you don’t do this, I will never forgive you.”
Didion screwed up her face, feeling hurt and angry all at once. “You’ll never forgive me for not going to college? How melodramatic is that?”
“Didion, I—I want something better for you than I had. And I never want you to be dependent on a man. I want you to make your own money, and I don’t want you to stand on your feet all day until you’re too tired to do it anymore and you run out of money and—”
A flush was rising in Babe’s cheeks.
“Is that why you quit restaurants? Because you were too tired?”
Babe shook her head. “Didion, you’re going to go back to school.
You’re one year down. Three left. You have no idea how fast that will go by, and then when you’re old like me, you’ll be able to look back and say that you did something.
How would you feel in three years when you can’t find a job, and you think, I could have a whole college degree by now? ”
Didion wanted to tell Babe that she wasn’t old. That she was younger than most of the moms Didion knew.
Instead, Didion let out a furious burst of sound. “I have nothing to use it for! And besides, you’re not even making Sammie apply anywhere! Which is incredibly unfair!”
“Sammie is different from you,” she said. “I can’t make her do anything, and if she doesn’t want to be there, she won’t get anything out of it.”
Didion barked a laugh. “Oh, so since I’m the golden child and she’s a total flake, I have to do something I hate? Why should the standards be different for me than they are for her?”
“Stop it.” Babe’s tone was so icy and biting that it took Didion by surprise. “This conversation is over.”
She pushed past her.
“You are so immature,” said Didion.
Her mother stopped at the top of the stairs. “How much of this is you wanting to go follow Austin around the world while he chases a dream that has nothing to do with you?”
This felt like a slap.
“It’s not about him, it’s—”
“It’s not? You fell in love too young, Didion. Every summer you two are together.”
“I have a boyfriend, remember Felix?” Didion spat.
Babe scoffed. “Felix.”
“I like him a lot, Mom.”
“Right. I’m sure you do. So aren’t you worried about leaving him behind if you quit school?”
She had her there.
“It doesn’t matter. And even if I did want to follow Austin around, which I don’t and he hasn’t asked me to—”
“If you do this, you’ll end up knocked up by twenty-two just like I did, and then you’ll watch all your dreams go by you.”
“What—” She didn’t know what to say. It felt a lot like her mother was saying she regretted she was ever born. “What dreams?”
She looked at the ground. “I love cooking, but it wasn’t what I wanted out of life. I didn’t want to serve other people. I wanted something bigger.”
“Like what, you’re talking in riddles!” Didion was so hurt by what her mother was saying, but the only way she could get the feeling out was to yell.
Her mother looked up at her sadly. “I didn’t even get to find out.
I became so busy being your mother that I never got to figure out what my dreams were.
One second I was young and had everything ahead of me, and the next I was throwing up in trash cans, the next after that I was giving birth to a baby I had no idea what to do with.
Then the postpartum depression, the weight I could never, ever lose.
Stuck in an endless daily loop of the same thing, over and over again, dropping you off at school, picking you up, making dinner—not a single moment of variety left.
We had Sammie because I thought doing it on purpose would make it feel like I’d chosen some part of my life. ”
“And did it?” Didion spat. She was fuming. Let her mother say it all, finally, so it was out in the open.
“You know…” Babe laughed. “It sort of did. Sammie was so easy, so affectionate, so—”
“All the things I wasn’t?”
Babe stared at her daughter. “You were never an easy child.”
This wounded Didion almost as much as everything else combined. All she did was try to be the easy one. She took on so much extra pressure so as never to complain. And yet Sammie came off as the easy one because, what, she was needier and sweeter?
It felt like the world was morphing into something new, something worse, around Didion with this information. “So, you’re saying everything that’s wrong with your life is all my fault for being born? Because that really wasn’t my choice.”
Babe’s eyebrows flitted up and her gaze fell to the ground. “No, it wasn’t mine either.”
Didion knew her father’s stance on abortion, but she’d never considered it in regards to herself, her own existence. And yet in that moment, it became very clear that this was what her mom was implying.
Something in Didion shut down. “Well, that’s your problem. Not mine, and you can’t take it out on me. I’m an adult now.”
Babe laughed again. “Eighteen is not an adult. Eighteen is a child. And as long as you’re living under my roof, you will do as I say.”
“First of all”—Didion laughed back—“I don’t live under your roof, and second of all, this is an awful lot of parenting after not doing a single lick of it in years.”
“You don’t live under my roof? What do you call this, Didion? Because you don’t get to take it for granted that you come back here every summer.”
Another slap. Did she want to push back? Possibly lose Birdsong, lose the island, lose her life here?
“I didn’t think so. Now drop it.” Babe knew her daughter too well. Didion looked away. Her mother left.
Didion fumed in her mother’s room for close to an hour.
The outside sounds did nothing to calm her like they usually did.
She walked around, hating Babe with everything she had.
On the bed, there was a three-card spread of tarot, and a candle was still burning in the bathroom, one of those tall prayer candles.
On the balcony there was an ashtray with a joint in it.
She smelled her mother’s glass on the vanity and it smelled like nail polish remover.
Well, if her mom could get messed up all the time, then so could Didion.
She went downstairs and found Matt, who was studying on the screened-in porch.
“Let’s go to that party.”
“At Johnny’s?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Matt groaned. “I can’t stand that guy.”
“I know, me neither, but I need to get out of here. I just had another fight with my mom.”
“About school?”
“Yep.” Didion texted Sammie. still there? we’re gonna come
Half an hour later, they were at Johnny’s house. His parents were out of town, and the place was overrun with wasted teenagers, a subwoofer pumping so hard Didion could feel it vibrate in her lungs.
They found Sammie in a back bedroom, dark except for a purple, pink, and green disco ball lamp, the walls covered in hippie tapestries. It smelled like skunks, and Didion knew enough by now to know there was weed.
Sammie jumped up and flung her arms around Didion and Matt.
When someone offered Didion a joint, she hesitated, then took it. Surprising her sister and her friend, and even herself.
Sammie didn’t smoke a lot, she wasn’t a stoner, but she had this sort of California-cool-girl vibe about her, and Didion wanted to be more like that. To care less.
Who was she kidding? She was just trying to rebel.
Matt smoked a little too, and Sammie screamed something about how crazy they were being.
It hit Didion hard and fast. She felt dizzy and disconnected. Her thoughts started coming in shouts. It felt like everyone around her was completely fine, feeling totally normal, and she was the only one who knew that something terrible was going to happen.
Her mouth was dry and her heart pounded in her ears. She was jumpy, almost rocketing out of her skin when Sammie touched her elbow.
It was awful. She hated it.
“How long does this last?” she asked Matt.
“Are you okay?” he asked, looking concerned.
“Am I?”
He laughed then, and she felt completely, unfairly betrayed by him.
She then became ultra-aware of her bladder. She clenched her pelvic floor, suddenly afraid she might pee herself.
She ran to find a bathroom, running into Johnny on the way, who laughed at her.
There was a long line, and Didion was starting to panic.
She tried to explain to the other girls in line, but the words wouldn’t come out right.
Didion ran out back, thinking maybe she could pee in the yard or something, but there were too many people to find any privacy.
She ran out front, where she found him. Austin.
He caught her as she ran up to him, his hands on her arms. She touched his face and asked if he was mad at her. He said he wasn’t.
She explained that she was probably going to pee herself, and he started to understand that she was stoned.
He told her to get in his car, and then he drove her down the road, the one mile it took to get to JJ’s Diner.
She ran in, and had never been more grateful for a toilet. After going—only about a teaspoon coming out anyway—she had panted over her knees and vowed never, ever to do that shit again.