Chapter 6 She Comes from Dildo
SHE COMES FROM DILDO
The next day, late on a Friday night, I had a video call with Laura that somehow turned into a fight.
It started out with Laura sending me a text saying Hannah wanted to talk, and I quickly jumped on a video call, carefully putting on my jovial aunt voice so that I wouldn’t say anything negative about her father.
Everything was great, and I loved Nick, and wasn’t this whole thing a bucket of fun?
“How’re you doing, Hannah Banana? Everything okay?”
She shrugged, which looked like an earthquake on the tiny phone screen. “It’s too hot here.”
“Well, that’s why we have the miracle of air conditioning.”
“I don’t like the kids in Georgia, Tabby.”
“Why not?”
“One of them said I needed a manicure.”
“A manicure?” At seven years old? I tried to keep calm.
“Yeah. She said my nails were gross.”
“Oh, sweetie.” I gritted my teeth at this classic mean girl behavior in its infant form, maddening in its inevitability. “Your nails are fine.”
“Hers were pink, and she said I needed a manicure because mine were gross. Can I come stay with you? Mommy says it’s not as hot where you are.”
“It is cooler here, but you can’t come stay yet. It’s a very long trip.”
“Please Tabby?” That is Hannah’s nickname for me, especially when she wants something. “You could pick me up from the airplane if Mommy doesn’t want to come. I could fly by myself.”
“Oh, honey, I miss you, too. But you’re going to be starting school, and you need time to get used to Atlanta. I promise that if I end up settling up here for good, I’ll fly you up lots of times. You’ll become an international travel expert. But not just yet. You’re still getting settled.”
“I don’t want to live in Georgia. I want to live in New York. I hate it here.” It was the first time she had openly admitted to being homesick, and I felt it like a horse hoof to the chest.
“I’ll come see you before you know it!” My voice was thin from desperation, the kind adults always have when they can’t tell a child the whole truth. “As soon as I can. And Atlanta is so cool. Lots of new things to do and people to meet. I heard you’re getting good at swimming.”
“Yeah,” Hannah agreed proudly. The change of topics seemed effective.
She started telling me all the different strokes she was learning, and how she was better than some of the kids who were nine years old.
Eventually, Laura appeared and sent Hannah to get in her pajamas so Nick could read to her before bedtime.
The image of Nick reading to her gave me an embarrassing flash of jealousy.
How dare he act like Hannah’s parent and Laura’s emotional support when that had been my job for the last few years?
“So how’s it going for you?” Laura’s tone was polite, even a little reserved.
“Good. I went to improv comedy practice.”
Laura blinked for a moment, taking in my words. “Well, that’s sounds fun and cool.”
“Definitely fun. Definitely not cool.”
“So…how did you get into that? Like an improv troupe?”
“I’m not into it. It just seemed like something different to try. I made a friend here and she asked me.”
“That’s neat.”
“Yeah.” My heart was speeding up and I realized I was furious with Laura’s patronizing tone. I consciously took a breath to calm down.
“You know you could have done improv comedy in New York, right?”
“Well, no one ever invited me.”
“Okay. Well, sure.” A long moment passed. “Listen, Hannah’s really missing you.”
I took another breath. In-and-out, Abigail. Slow and steady breathing. “Yeah, I’m going to come see you guys whenever I get back from Newfoundland.”
“So you’re not moving there permanently.” Emphasis on the permanently. Emphasis on the fact that Laura had never taken this seriously.
“I might be.” I said it just to bait her, to see if I could get a reaction, but she didn’t give me one.
I pressed on. “But in any case, I would have to come back to Brooklyn to organize the move and clear out my apartment. Assuming I can figure out a green card and stuff. I have to see a lawyer. I’m still deciding. ”
“I guess I don’t understand why you had to move halfway around the world in the opposite direction from us to make some kind of a statement.”
“I’m worried about climate change.”
“Climate change.” Her video image was perfectly placed for me to see her entire eyeroll.
Sister fights are always particularly nasty because they’re about everything and nothing.
“Abs, I know you’re just doing this to try to prove a point,” Laura said.
“What point?”
“That you can survive without us.”
“You’re the one who told me to leave.”
“I didn’t say go to Newfoundland. I said if you had something you wanted to try, you should go ahead. But I didn’t think you were moving to the Arctic Circle.”
“I’m not in the Arctic Circle.”
“Well, it seems like a deliberate way to make it impossible for us to see you. You could have stayed in New York where you could actually fly down to see us for like three hundred dollars instead of thousands of dollars from Newfoundland...”
“Okay, well if you guys decide to stay there…”
“We are staying here.” Now Laura looked angry.
“Okay, well, if you do, I will come and visit,” I went on. “And you know, maybe I’ll just buy a place up here and then I can come stay with you guys for a couple of weeks every winter when it’s really snowy up here.”
“You’re serious about moving to Newfoundland? Newfoundland. New…found…land.”
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
“Because your niece misses you and you are choosing to never see her.”
“If you stay in Atlanta.”
“We are staying in Atlanta. Nick wants to buy a place here, before the market goes up anymore, because if we wait another year, we may not be able to afford it.”
This was news. “But you’re still figuring out if this is going to work.”
“Abby, we were married for years. I know him.”
“And things are going well?”
“Why is that so hard for you to believe?”
“Okay, so what do you want me to do, Laur? Move there?”
“Well, yeah, I want you to be closer to your family.” I don’t know why Laura and I always managed to go full Desperate Housewives when we disagreed about something. It was probably because we agreed often enough so that every disagreement seemed like betrayal.
“How about this?” I began. “If you and Nick can make it a year together…”
“Oh, stop.”
“If you do, I’ll think about moving closer, but right now, I’m pretty serious about Canada.”
“Because you’re that sure Nick and I will break up.”
“Why couldn’t he come to New York? And why doesn’t he pay the child support he owes you before he started talking about buying a home? Isn’t it up to like four thousand dollars?”
“This is none of your—”
“And I assume he wants you to put in some money for this home he wants to buy.”
“Enough, okay.” Which meant yes, of course.
“What?” My attempts at calm were fully out the window. “You guys left me, okay. You moved away from me, and I’m supposed to follow you at the snap of your fingers?”
“So Newfoundland is your life now? And improv comedy?”
“As much as Georgia is yours.”
“And your new improv friends are more important to you than your niece?”
“It’s not me who moved away, Laura. You left.”
“You know what? I’m going to go.”
“Fine. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I regretted my tone as soon as I hung up.
Okay, I regretted it an hour or two after I hung up.
I knew I’d been sarcastic and unsupportive, but the fight had made one thing clear: deep down, Laura really had been expecting me to follow her down there.
She still was. If she and Nick worked it out, then I was going to have a decision to make.
I missed Hannah, but I wasn’t sure I wanted Laura’s life to be my entire life. Not anymore.
Paul was right about the improv books. They were surprisingly good.
I spent my Saturday wandering the city while reading most of Impro.
I had a good reading system that I’d developed for my literature courses in college: read one chapter and then change your locale.
Coffee shop, hillside park, brick wall with a decent view, different coffee shop, living room, bed.
You could get a lot of pages covered that way and flatter yourself that you were getting exercise in the process—a form of interval training where the intervals were croissants.
The author of the first book seemed to have been raised in a really repressed British education system, and it made him want to explode all the little boxes that people put themselves in.
For him, improvisation was about reconnecting with the rule-breaker within.
One of the improvisational exercises he used to do was having people imagine that they had taken a book off a shelf, and then they opened it to a page, and he would tell them to pretend to ‘read aloud’ what they saw there.
He had examples in his book where people had come up with whole poems, beautiful stories, just by pretending that somebody else had written them.
That struck me, the idea that we can be more creative and imaginative when we pretend we are reading from someone else’s work. I wondered if I could believe I was more capable if I was channeling someone else.