We drop my mom at work so we can have her car to drive around, to go to the zoo, to get lunch. Three of the five days that we’re there I drive my mom’s car past Sasha’s. Once, when the kids are both asleep and I’m just drained enough by the sun and weary, I almost pull into Sasha’s parents’ driveway before I remember she’s not there.
I hardly shower the whole time we’re there and stay salty all day, traipsing sand over my father’s perfect floors while he stays quiet, mostly, wincing as our girls climb on the couch that I know no one sits on most of the time. He sits, usually with the TV on, while the children choose their cereal, while my mom makes dinner at night, while we all work not to fight.
I love Florida and I hate it. It’s warm here even though it’s still wet and cold in New York, and the beach goes on for miles with almost no one there. The stretch I run each morning is my favorite stretch of beach, my favorite stretch of land, maybe, in the world, so gorgeous and familiar, elemental to me; it’s a thrill to share it with my girls. Every other part of this place, though, makes me anxious; my parents talking makes my body clench and I feel the children’s bodies clench because mine is. They get worn out from the sun and throw tantrums. They can tell I’m not quite steady and they cling to me all day, crawl into bed with me at night.
* * *
I keep thinking I’ll ask my parents for money. I think vaguely, when I said yes to coming, that this was why. I keep thinking: Their house is so big, and our older daughter keeps asking why they have so many bathrooms. It’s lots of open space, dark wood, and blues and whites. They’ve gotten better over years at being wealthy. Neither of them grew up with money, but now they hire the right people to teach them how to spend what they have.
I was twenty-one when I told them that I did not want their fucking money. I was just out of college, stupid, privileged. What I was saying was I dare you. Try to find some way to love me in the way that I need loving. It was one of their favorite things to hold against me: my brand-new car and college education, the years that my sister and I got to ride horses on the weekends when we were small. I wanted them not to have this particular ammunition, to see what other forms of loving they might be up to instead.
What was most embarrassing was that when it came time to need, it was the thing I’d thought was not enough, it was their fucking money, that I wished that they would give to me.
Now, I want them to see my need, but I don’t ask and they don’t offer so instead I’m mean in small ways and then feel awful afterward.
They have to go to bed, Mom, I say, when she plans a movie night with my cousin and her children. Don’t make all that food, I say, when she goes to cook an extra pound of fish. All she wants to do is cook them food and give them gifts and take their pictures so that she can post them on the internet. She wants to get some of the pictures printed and put into frames that match the frames that hold the pictures of my sister and me when we were children and put them on the mantel so she can look at them while she cooks dinner or gets dressed to go to work.
My father hardly speaks the whole time. There’s a TV in every room and he watches CNBC. He looks scared when he looks at me, like the mess of me might somehow get on him and he won’t ever be able to get clean.
Once, he asks about my job and I start to tell them but then my mother says, Those kids are so lucky to have you, and I look down at the food she’s made me, then over at my children who’ve stopped eating and are playing, and I say, No they’re not, Mom, and the three of us turn back toward the TV.
* * *
On the last day, my mother plays with our girls out on the porch. Both of them have come to love her. My father sits on his computer and I stay as still as I can in a corner of the couch. My mother pulls out all the toys that she’s bought for the children and that we have no room for in our apartment—that I can’t, by myself, carry back home on the plane.
We have to go soon, I say. They’ve gotten us a car to the airport.
My dad looks at his watch, and my parents look at one another.
Not yet, my father says. His ankle sits on his knee, and he opens up a file on his computer.
My mother’s small eyes flit from my daughters to my father and back to me.
Watch this, my dad says. I move closer to him. You have to watch this before you go, he says.
His arms are crossed; so are my mother’s. They’re both attorneys. My whole life, their arms have been crossed.
He starts the video and there’s laughing, yelling. It’s me, my sister, my older cousin. I’m five or six, my sister two behind, my cousin two ahead. We’re romping around the large house we lived in most of our early childhood. My uncle, who’s visiting from far away, films. There’s music playing and we’re dancing. We’re a little bratty, laughing, singing. We change our clothes. We romp and squeal. My little sister emulates our cousin, flapping her hair in front of her face and laughing, her nose close to the screen. I wear pigtails, the same pigtails I wore every day—my mother braided them, all dressed for work in heels and suit, black coffee, Estée Lauder lotion and perfume—straight up to middle school.
My father watches me—the grown-up me, not the one that’s laughing, singing.
So, he says.
My mother watches too.
I know better than to talk right now.
This must be why you hate us? he says. This part?
We’re still laughing. Five-year-old me has changed into a bathing suit and is running out to dive into the pool.
He says, Is this the childhood that made you do such awful things to us?
I want to ask them if they’re serious. I want to stand up on this couch and yell and scream. There are twenty-nine years to fill the gap between this video and this day. I don’t— I say, but then I stop. I can’t tell him that you can’t make a video of notness, that there’s no way to record all the ways they weren’t there.
This must be the part, my father says.
I dive into the pool on the screen.
Please, I say.
My mom stares at me: this must be the face she gives opposing counsel when she feels she’s shut them down.
We have to go, I say.
My daughters look at me.
I’ve asked them not to do this when my girls are with me. I asked them to promise not to fight with me. They’re not yelling now, though; they’re just reminding me quietly, just by looking, of all that I’ve done wrong.
We’re leaving, I say.
I pick up our two-year-old and she starts to scream. She arches her back. Her soft, round belly pops out from underneath her shirt.
My mother stands.
My father’s ankle comes off his knee and his feet are even on the floor.
I grab hold of our four-year-old’s hand.
She’s fine, my mother says. The four-year-old looks at me, then her, then me. She keeps hold of my hand.
They follow us to the front door. We leave the toys and all the clothes my mother bought them. I have our two small bags. We sit, quiet, on the driveway and the baby nurses and the four-year-old flips through a book until the car comes to pick us up.
* * *
Coming home: the plane lands and I pull the bags out from the overhead compartment and the two-year-old cries most of the time because I can’t hold her and our luggage and the four-year-old wets her pants as we get off the plane. Both of them want to sit in the fold-up stroller, so I put the four-year-old in first and then her sister on her lap and tell both of them to hold on tight; an old woman shakes her head at me, mutters loud enough so I can hear that I am being reckless with those precious babies, and it takes all the strength I have not to yell in her face. Out near the baggage claim, close to the exit, my husband, rumpled, no bag, coat unzipped and open, lets the children sit a minute longer, lets them fight about who gets to hug him first and roll out of the stroller onto the dirty airport carpet, takes all the bags off of my shoulders and puts them on the floor next to the children, arms around me, holds me, hugs me, whispers in my ear, You’re home.