Then she’d started to feel sad about saying good-bye to Bee and it reminded her of good-byes generally. So Carmen turned to the most recent issue of CosmoGIRL! for solace, as she often did in moments like these. And voilà, she was swept away by the imperative need to copy the innovative use of fake eyelashes on page 23. Sometimes it paid to be shallow.
It was so different for Carmen these days, walking into her mother’s room. The reason was obvious: It wasn’t her mother’s room anymore. It was her mom and David’s room. A woman’s room was so different than a woman’s room together with a man. It was utterly different when the woman was your mother and the man was her spanking-new husband, whom you’d met less than a year before.
Carmen wasn’t grateful for her parents’ divorce. There were so many things she’d lost. But it took David’s presence now to show her what remarkable access and role-defying closeness she’d shared with her mother for all those years when it had been just the two of them.
When her father had first left, a lot of the usual boundaries had come down. She’d slept in her mother’s bed almost every night for a year. Was it for Carmen’s sake? Or for Christina’s? Once there was no dad coming home after a hard day of work, “we girls,” as her mother called them, had eaten Eggo waffles or scrambled eggs for dinner many nights. Carmen had considered it a treat, not having to saw through some hunk of flank steak and stomach the obligatory vegetables.
Carmen used to feel an easy ownership of this room. Now she treaded uncertainly. She used to flop at will on her mother’s bed. It was a different bed now. Not literally a different bed, but in every other way different. She steered wide around it now.
It wasn’t just that the room contained a lot of male stuff. David wasn’t a slob or anything. He was always conscious that this apartment had been Christina and Carmen’s long before he joined up. He commanded one closet, three bookshelves, and a new bureau from Pottery Barn. He didn’t even have pictures yet. The room now testified not so much to him but to them—their intimacy, the things they whispered to each other when they were falling asleep. Even when they weren’t present, Carmen felt like she was invading it.
The bathroom used to bloom with female stuff—creams, lotions, makeup, tampons, and perfume. Now, in deference to them, Christina kept it all mostly stowed in the cabinet. Even seeing David’s shaving cream can lined up next to Christina’s nail polish remover made Carmen feel like she’d just crawled between them in bed.
The false eyelashes weren’t in the medicine cabinet, Carmen quickly discovered. When you lived with your daughter, you left things like that in easy view. When you lived with your brand-new husband, you hid the evidence.
Carmen already knew that most of the stuff Christina didn’t want David to see, she stored in the cabinet above the toilet. Yes, this was the right department, Carmen realized as soon as she’d jiggled open the sticky door. There was wart remover, there was mustache bleach, there was bikini wax and hair straightening balm and a box of Nice ’n Easy in Deep Mahogany. Carmen snaked her hand toward the back, knocking over appetite suppressants and a pack of laxatives. A plastic bottle was set rolling by the falling laxatives. Carmen watched in displeasure as it fell off the shelf and…splash, into the toilet. Damn.
She watched it bobbing in the toilet water. She could see it contained some kind of vitamins. She really hoped the cap was watertight.
While she delayed reaching her hand into the toilet—who hurried to do a thing like that?—she absently wondered why her mother kept vitamins in the cabinet of shame. David was all about vitamins. He ate them for breakfast. He talked about various herbal supplements like they were his best friends. What kind of vitamins would Christina keep from her dashing nutrition-man?
Carmen’s curiosity was always her best motivator. She stuck her hand in the toilet and plucked out the bottle, tossing it directly into the sink and running hot water over it. She added some liquid soap. Once the bottle and her hand were sufficiently clean, she turned it over to satisfy her questioning mind.
Her head grew chill and fuzzy. The fuzz invaded her chest and expanded in her lower abdomen. The front of the label communicated precisely why this bottle lived between the laxatives and the Preparation H. But it wasn’t David her mom was trying to hide them from. At least, that was what Carmen powerfully suspected.
They were prenatal vitamins. The kind you took when you were having a baby. And Christina was almost certainly hiding them from Carmen.
Tibby squinted in the morning sunlight. She was groggy and disoriented, her lips were swollen, and her eyes felt puffy. She felt like she had a hangover, but not because she’d had any alcohol.
It was one of those mornings when you come to terms with a strange new reality. You ask yourself, Did I dream that? Did I actually do that? Did he really say that? Reality comes back in bits and pieces, and you experience the novelty of it all over again. You wonder, Will this day and this night and tomorrow and all the rest of the days be different because of what happened last night? And in Tibby’s case, she knew the answer.
She put her fingers on her lips. Could you get a hangover from kissing?
Was Brian awake yet? She pictured him in his bed. She pictured him in her bed. She got the shivery feeling in the bottom of her stomach, so she stopped picturing him in her bed. Was he regretting anything? Was she regretting anything?
What would they say when they saw each other again?
Would he just drop by during pancakes the way he often did? Would he plant a wet one on her lips and wait to see if anyone noticed?
She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. Did she look as different as she felt? Hmmm. Same black watch plaid pajama bottoms hanging down around her hips. Same undersized white tank top baring several inches of belly. Maybe not.
Her room was a big, cluttered mess. There was nothing new about that, but she did notice it in a new way as she looked around. Had she ever thrown out anything in her life?
There were layers and layers of Tibby detritus both on the walls and on the floor. You could do an archaeological dig in this room and probably unearth her Fisher-Price farm if you tried hard enough. What was the matter with her?
It was dusty and stuffy and it bothered her. It was always dusty and stuffy. It didn’t always bother her. In an uncharacteristic move, she walked over to the window and forced it open. It was hard going, because she had not opened this room to actual air in as long as she could remember. The paint stuck a bit as she wrenched up the sash. Oh.
The air came in and it did feel good. It was nice, open like this. The breeze blew around some of the papers on her desk, but she didn’t mind.
She heard her mother downstairs in the kitchen. She thought of telling her about Brian. A part of her really wanted her mom to know. Alice would be excited. She would make a big deal about it. She loved Brian. She would love the idea of her daughter telling her about a juicy milestone like this one. It was her mother-daughter fantasy—the very thing Tibby so often denied her.
As Tibby left her room she registered the sound of the rustling leaves of the apple tree, so little heard here, and she liked it.
Tibby watched her mother in her usual morning flurry. Would she be able to slow down for Tibby’s news? Tibby tried to formulate the opening sentence. “Brian and I…Me and Brian…”
Tibby opened her mouth, but Alice got there first.
“Tibby, I need you to stay with Katherine this morning.” Alice already sounded mad and Tibby hadn’t even refused yet.
Tibby’s words dried up.
Alice wouldn’t look in Tibby’s eyes, indicating that she felt guilty somewhere down deep, but the guilt only made her less patient. “Loretta has to take her sister to the doctor and she can’t be back till after lunch.” Alice snatched the juice boxes from the shelf and shoved one at Nicky. “Or that’s what she says, anyway,” she added ungenerously.
“Why does her sister have to go to the doctor?” Nicky asked.
“Sweetie, she
has some kind of infection, I don’t know.” Alice gestured the whole issue away with a sweep of her arm, as if it might or might not be true, but she couldn’t spend any more time thinking about it.
Alice was flinging things into and out of her purse. “I have to take Nicky to camp and then go to the office.”