And then she had taken a pen and recorded everything ugly about my face.
* * *
—
The doorbell rang. I swore. Lacie wasn’t likely to waltz home in the middle of the day, but what if she had? What if she had forgotten her keys? I went to the door with my arms crossed against my chest, braced.
It was the UPS guy. “Lucinda Salt?” he asked, holding out a big brown box. More yarn, no doubt.
“Yep.” With the stylus I signed, a big L and S. “Thank you so much,” I purred.
“You’re welcome,” he gushed, taking in my short dress, my cleavage, my glossy red lips. Then he winked.
I was grinning as I shut the door. Her clothes were a kind of magic. With them, ordinary words, an ordinary moment, flushed pink.
Later, though, I felt disgusted and ashamed, bloated, as if I had gorged myself on candy. Lolling on the couch, back in my boring blue jeans, I vowed to stop.
When I was seven years old I had found my mom’s journal, a lavender lily-covered thing. She had hardly bothered to hide it, just tossed it in the wicker basket beside her bed beneath a few magazines. It was easy enough to find. For a few days after my discovery, I didn’t crack the cover. I would just go and touch it. I liked knowing it was there.
But eventually, I opened. I read. I was a good reader for my age; I could read her bubbly handwriting quickly, in the moments when she was downstairs flipping the laundry or fixing me a snack. In this way, I learned that when my father had forgotten my permission slip they had fought violently, in whispers, after I had gone to bed; that she felt he had never, never done his share of the household chores; that they hadn’t had sex in eight months; that she hated her thighs.
Hardly earth-shattering revelations, and yet they scalded me. The idea that the cheerful, supportive, steady presence in my life hated her thighs, and occasionally her husband, broke over me like a thunderclap. It was the beginning of learning that other people had private lives. It was the beginning of learning to write.
I’m still not sure how she caught me. I was always careful to put the journal back exactly where I found it. But one day I came home from school and found both my parents waiting. They sat me down in our white swivel chair and grimly explained that privacy and respect were more meaningful when freely given. They didn’t want to live in a home where some things needed to be hidden, and they were wondering: did I agree?
On and on they went, and the longer they talked, refusing to say the word “journal,” the more my shame became rage. Why couldn’t they be direct? Everything was soft with them. Everything was cloaked in cloth, and yet they were so self-righteous and sure. Mumbling my apology, I shook their hands, and that was that—no punishment, no consequence. As usual, just a “talk.”
In an act of naïveté—or defiance, I could never decide which—my mom continued keeping her journal in her wicker basket, and I continued reading it. We never discussed it again. Gradually I lost interest in her self-pitying complaints. Gradually I began to skim only for my name, which showed up with surprising infrequency. Reading her journal became less about cracking her psyche and more about separating myself from my parents. If they were going to be so smug in their self-control, then I would be the kind of person who had none. Who did what she wanted, and never apologized.
Not that I ever had the courage to execute that kind of stance in a public way. I just snuck. Snooped. All these years later I was still snooping, and as it fueled the novel I snooped more. Day after day, morning after morning, I went into Lacie’s room. I lay on her bed. I tried on her earrings and turned the pages of her notebooks.
Then, after a morning of “writing”—that is to say, drinking Lacie’s coffee and trying on her clothes—I would rise like an automaton and run the odd polygon that was Prospect Park, my legs mechanically pumping up the same hill, sailing past the boarded-up bandshell. Then I would frantically shower and stuff some more of Lacie’s food in my mouth before heading out—backpack swinging, hair still wet—to tutor.
Standing on the Manhattan-bound Q platform at Church Avenue, bag loaded with College Board SAT guides, purse packed with power bars and water and gum, I would think over and over, I hate this, I hate this, and then, almost immediately: Shut up, shut up. It’s not that bad. It’s just a job. It’s really not that bad.
To soothe myself I would think again of the hours already worked that week, of Lulu and Esme, Finn and Rome. If nobody canceled this month, if nobody got sick or had a baseball tournament or a long weekend in Hawaii or London or St. John’s, this total, multiplied by four, would bring me…well, minus rent, minus health insurance, minus groceries, minus…I multiplied and subtracted, estimated and rounded. Moving to New York had turned me into a calculating machine.
When people asked, I always said that tutoring was “fine,” that it was an “easy” way to make a living, that the kids were sometimes “fun.” But that was a lie. Sitting in a cramped or dark or fussy apartment, craning my neck as a high-schooler penciled in her algebra, I felt berserk.
I especially felt berserk when the parents wanted to “check in.” Although ostensibly checking in was a chance for me to tell them about their child’s progress, the real purpose of checking in was for the parents to brag. After a few weeks of working with Lila, for instance, her father, a semi-famous sexologist with a series of YouTube videos (“Is Monogamy Necessary?” and “Sexuality: We’re Learning More All the Time!”) asked me to step into his office.
Jazzy red polygons squiggled across the gray industrial rug. He offered me a cone of water from the cooler. Then, leaning back in his executive chair behind his massive desk, he said, “My daughter, she’s a wonderful human being. She’s a delight. I couldn’t be prouder of her.”
“She’s great,” I murmured, though privately I thought she was dumb as a rock.
“And Lila, the thing about Lila is, she’s never going to be a top scorer. That’s not where she is. And my wife and I, we don’t want to make her into something she’s not. We don’t want her to go to a school where she shouldn’t be. But I’ll tell you, Barnard could be an excellent opportunity for her. She does very well in an all-girl environment. And it’s funny, I said to her, we only get a few days in our lives to change our lives. We only get a few opportunities. And this could be this for her, that day that she takes the test.
“And so, I just don’t want this test to shut down any opportunity for her. I don’t want it to be the reason she doesn’t get into some school. Because once she’s there, she’ll be fine. She’s such a kind, giving, generous young woman. But I just think…you know, once, I took her up to the roof of our summer home, in East Hampton, I did, and I taught her the times tables. I said, we’re not going down until you’ve got the twelves. Because me, I happen to like numbers, I like math. You know, when I was a kid, I memorized my times tables, up to the fifteens, just for fun.” He laughed fondly. “And when we came down, it had started to rain, we were all wet, and her poor mother was like, Where did she go? What did you do to her?”