Chapter 6
JENNA
Dinner on Monday was the worst meal we've had in this house in years, and nothing happened at it. No scene. A chicken thing in a dish, three people at a table, everybody polite.
Eric asked Lucy about her science test. Lucy said it was fine. He asked what was on it and she said cells, and he asked which part of cells, and she said, "The parts," in the voice that means please stop conducting an interview.
I asked about the plant. Eric said the number four line was down again. I said that's too bad. He said it's the same bearing.
"Is that bad?" Lucy asked.
"It's a bearing."
"Okay."
"It's the same bearing as last time."
"Okay," she said again, and looked at me.
Lucy asked if there was more rice. There was more rice. I got up and got it. Nobody had said a word by the time I sat back down, and nobody said one for another minute or so, which at a dinner table is roughly a year.
She looked at him, then at me. Then she started in on a very long story about a substitute teacher, with a great deal of unnecessary detail, at a slightly raised volume, and kept it going four minutes. She was filling it for us. She kept her eyes on the salt shaker the whole time.
I cleared the plates. Eric did the dishes without being asked, which isn't unusual, but he did them very carefully and then wiped the counters, which is.
Later she came into the laundry room while I was pulling towels out of the dryer. She'd been up in her room with the door shut for an hour, which isn't unusual anymore, but she came down holding a notebook, and that's how I knew she'd been working on something.
"I have an idea."
"Hit me."
"So." She flipped it open. She had drawn a diagram — an actual diagram, with labels, in two colors. "What if I wear Grandma's dress, but Mom's wings go over it. Like on top. And the crown still works, because moths have antennae, and antennae are basically a crown."
"Antennae are basically a crown," I repeated.
"They're both on your head."
I dropped the towels in the basket, sat down on the step between the laundry room and the kitchen, which is a bad place to sit, and patted the space next to me anyway.
She sat with the notebook open on her knees. She'd done the wings in green pen and the dress in blue, with a little arrow and the word STRAPS.
"The straps would go over the cape," she said. "I could hold the cape out of the way with my arms. Or you could sew the harness onto the dress, maybe? Just a little bit? Like just at the shoulders, so it wouldn't wreck it?"
"Lucy."
"Or I could wear the dress at the party for the pictures and then change into the moth after, in Grandma's bathroom, if we brought it in the car — "
"Lucy. Stop."
She stopped.
Her voice had been picking up speed the whole time, which is what she does when she's afraid the answer's no, and her ear had gone red. Two colors. Labels. An arrow.
None of it was about wings.
"Put the notebook down."
She put it down, though she kept one finger on the corner of it.
"This is not your job."
"But I don't want — "
"I know what you don't want. It's still not your job."
"You guys are being weird," she said, and out it came fast, the way things come out of her. "You're being weird at dinner. Dad keeps looking at you. And Grandma texted me a picture of shoes."
"She texted you shoes?"
"Silver ones. To go with the dress."
I shut my eyes for a second.
"Okay. Listen to me. Both costumes are good."
"I know."
"No, hang on, I want you to hear the whole sentence.
Both costumes are good. Grandma's dress is gorgeous, and when you came down those stairs in it I made the same face everybody else made, and that was real.
And the moth is the best thing we've ever built, and it's ours, and I love it.
Both of those are true at the same time.
Nobody's asking you to say one of them isn't."
"Then why does it matter which one I wear?"
"Because they're at the same time, and that's not your fault, and it isn't Grandma's fault either. Grown people made that collision. Grown people will fix it."
Lucy pulled her sleeves down over her hands.
"You and Dad are fighting."
"We're disagreeing. Loudly, in the case of your father, who is never loud, so it's been very dramatic in here."
That got a small laugh out of her, though not much of one.
"You're not going to be the one who picks. That's what I want you to know tonight. If anybody asks you which one you want — Grandma, me, anybody — you're allowed to say ask my parents. Blame me. Say Mom's being a psycho about it."
"I'm not going to say that."
"You have my permission to say that."
"I'd get in trouble."
"You would not get in trouble. There is no version of this where you get in trouble."
"Grandma asked me too," she said.
I kept my voice exactly where it was.
"Asked you what?"
"On the phone, when she sent the shoes. She said, you'll wear the dress for me, won't you."
"And what did you say?"
"I said yes." She pulled at the drawstring of her sweatpants. "It was the only thing there was to say, Mom. She was on the phone."
"I know it was."
"So am I lying now?"
"No. You're not lying. You're eleven, and a grown woman asked you a question you had no way to answer, and you answered it the nice way. That isn't lying, that's just what happens to kids."
She leaned into my shoulder, almost too big for it now, her head coming up to my collarbone when we're sitting.
"I really do like the dress," she said, quietly, the way you confess something.
"I know you do."
"Is that bad?"
"God, no. Lucy. It's a beautiful dress, and your grandmother picked it because she thought of you when she saw it. Liking it is the correct response to it."
She sat there another minute, then went upstairs, and I finished folding the towels standing up, badly, and put them in the wrong closet.
She'd left the notebook on the step. I picked it up to take it to her and then didn't. I looked at the diagram again instead — the arrow, the word STRAPS, the two colors — and at the small careful note down in the corner that I'd missed the first time.
ask mom first — its her thing too
I put it face down on the bottom stair for her to take up in the morning, and I have never mentioned it to her since.
Eric was in the front room with the lamp on, doing nothing, which he almost never does. No TV, no phone, just the chair.
"She came to me with a diagram."
"I heard some of it."
"She wanted to wear the wings over the dress."
"Huh." He rubbed his jaw. "That's — I mean, that's actually a solid instinct. Structurally that's not the worst — "
"Eric."
"Yeah." He put his hand down. "I know. I know what it means that she came up with it."
I sat on the arm of the couch, where I could see the wings against the wall edge on, two thin green lines in the lamplight.
"So here's where I've landed," he said. "What if we let her choose."
I didn't answer right away.
"Hear me out. It's her costume, it's her Halloween, she's not a baby.
She's eleven, she's got opinions about everything from cereal to the Middle East. If she picks the dress, then it's the dress, and nobody's mad, because it came from her.
" He'd leaned forward, warming up to it, because he'd found something that felt like fairness.
"And if she picks the moth, Mom can't say a word about it.
Mom can't argue with Lucy. Neutral. Right? It takes both of us out of it."
"Say the rest of it."
"What rest?"
"Say what happens in her head when she picks. Walk me through it. She's standing in Diane's kitchen. Diane spent three hundred dollars, cried when she opened the bag, and has already sent the shoes. I spent six weeks at the kitchen table with her, and she watched me do it. Now she picks one."
His mouth stayed open a second.
"She's not picking a costume. She's picking which woman she's willing to disappoint, in front of both of them."
"That's not — "
"And whichever one she picks, she carries it. Not us. Her. For years, probably, because that's the kind of thing kids keep."
He sat back. "Right."
Then, after a second: "Which one do you think she'd pick?"
"I don't know."
"Come on."
"Eric, I don't know." I got up off the arm of the couch. "That's not me being cute about it. She's had that crown on her head doing homework since Saturday, and she screamed in a dark hallway on Tuesday night. Ask me on two different days and I'd tell you two different things."
"Then how are you so sure it's — "
"Because it doesn't matter which one she wants more.
" I picked a piece of dried glue off the back of my hand and put it in my pocket, which is a thing I do.
"That's the part you keep skipping. It was never going to come down to her preference.
It comes down to who has to say it out loud in a kitchen with both of us standing there. "
He didn't say anything.
"And she'd do it, too. She'd pick whichever one made the room easiest, and then she'd be fine about it." My voice went flat, which is what mine does. "She's very good at being fine about it. She learned that somewhere."
"So no."
"So no."
"I hear you." He said it slowly, looking at the wings. "I hear you. That's — okay. That one was bad."
"It was."
"I liked it a lot for about four hours."
"I could tell."
He laughed, and it came out rough, and then he went quiet for a while. I let him, because I could see it going around behind his face.
"If it's not her," he said at last, "and it's not you — "
"It was never going to be me. If I tell Diane, I'm the daughter-in-law who threw her gift back."
"I know."
"Say the rest."
"It's me," Eric said.
I didn't say anything at all, which felt important.
"Yeah," he said, mostly to himself. "Okay. It's me."